





library of congress, 


p™ STATES OP AMERICA. | 




































FREE THOUGHTS 


LONDON 

PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE AND CO. 
NEW-STREET SQUARE 


REE THOUGH 


ON MANY SUBJECTS: 


A SELECTION FROM 

ARTICLES CONTRIBUTED TO 4 FRASER* 9 MAGAZINE.* 


Tto& 


V-LTL 


y 


ol 


BY 

A MANCHESTER MAN. 


‘Our Thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.’ 

Hamlet. 


LONDON: 

LONGMANS, GREK N, AND CO. 

InU]. 

' 5 A 


; 



e <b 

4s# 

v 




INTRODUCTION. 


The following Essays and Sketches appeared in 
Fraser's Magazine, for the most part when the 
late Mr. John W. Parker, Junior, was its Editor, 
to whose memory the writer begs to offer a pass¬ 
ing tribute of sincere respect. They were written 
mainly in c overhours,’ as a mental recreation in 
the midst of more severe and distracting duties. 
This is not adduced either as an excuse for their 
defects or a plea for the forbearance of readers, still 
less as conferring on them an a priori title to com¬ 
mendation: the remark attributed to the great 
Athenian orator and leader, Pericles, on the care 
required for perfecting seamanship, may not be in¬ 
applicable to the production of a Magazine Article : 
To Ss vavTLKov t sx v V 9 zgtiv, cocnrsp kcli aWo n, icai 
ovk EvSs^srat, orav rvxV’ * K ' T ^ a P^P < y° v p^sXsrdaOai,, 
nWd ptiWov fxi)hsv skslvm rrapsp^ov aWo 7/7 vsaOai. 


VI 


INTRODUCTION. 


(Thucydides, i. 142.) e Skill in naval matters, 
like that in other occupations, partakes of the 
nature of an art, and the acquisition of it does 
not admit of being taken up as a by-work, as 
chance may allow, but it is rather fitting that 
nothing else should be made a by-work to it.’ 

Though the first Essay appeared so long ago as 
1848, the series has been reprinted with but few 
alterations. Statistical Tables have been omitted, 
which after a time are usually estimated at the 
value of a preceding year’s Almanack; and oc¬ 
casionally, but very rarely, a more permanent 
setting has been given to allusions that were of 
passing and ephemeral interest. 

On revising these Articles, the writer is con¬ 
strained to acknowledge that the 6 thoughts ’ con¬ 
tained in some of them are 6 free ’ and freely 
expressed; but whether they be just in principle 
and correct in aim, others must decide. 

E. L. 

Manchester : 

May 1. 1866 . 


CONTENTS 


OF 

THE FIRST VOLUME. 


PAGE 

I. A Manufacturing District : A Sketch 
from Nature. 

II. Our Manufacturing Populations,—The 

Educational Agency among them . 41 

III. Manchester. 83 

IV. The Church among the Tall Chimneys . 131 
V. A Treatise on Humbug . . . .172 

VI. A Whitweek in Manchester . . . 205 
VII. An Essay on Popularity .... 241 
VIII. A Discourse on Crotchets .... 283 

. 323 


IX. Moral Leverage for the Masses 



















V >-» 


























• in 








I. 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 

A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


+ 


There is a homely saying, that * one half of the world 
knows not how the other half lives.’ Homely however 
as the adage is, it embodies an important truth, and 
suggests grave thoughts. Walk through the squares, 
or along the streets, at the west end of the metropolis; 
mark the external magnificence of the buildings, and 
picture to yourself the costly luxuries within; enter 
the parks, and behold the gorgeous equipages rolling 
on like a stream which is too large for its channel; 
see the lazy postures and satiety-stamped faces of 
those who occupy the costly carriages. Then walk 
meditatively to the far east; and after you have arrived 
at the well-digested conclusion, that our nation is 1 a 
mighty nation, an understanding people,’ take a survey 
of the surrounding neighbourhood. See those filthy 
streets and squalid dwellings, congenial habitations for 
the 'sons and daughters of misery. Look at those dirty, 

h 


VOL. I. 


B 



2 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


ragged children, who are enjoying themselves in their 
native gutters, and seem to be promising candidates for 
the Old Bailey. Mark that poverty-stricken mother 
who is standing at yonder door with the pale-faced 
child in her arms: from her vacant expression of 
countenance, she hears not the monotonous clack of 
the shuttle from within. Why should she ? It is 
to her only the time-clock which ticks through the 
live-long day. Listen to the sounds which proceed 
from the. wretched-looking house with the broken 
windows; they are the everyday noises of a father 
swearing in his drink, and children crying for their 
supper. Look on this picture, and on that. Yerily, 

‘ one half of the world knows not how the other half 
lives ! ’ But ought it to be so ? 

In the large manufacturing towns of England the 
differences between classes are hardly less perceptible ; 
the proverb is scarcely less true. There is one order 
of men however who have the privilege of being 
acquainted with the habits of both the rich and the poor. 
The clergy of the Established Church are a connecting 
link between the extremes of society. They are not 
above the poor, nor below the rich. They stand with 
one foot on the sanded floor of the cottage, and with the 
other on the Turkey carpet of the mansion. This is 
hardly a figure of speech. It frequently happens that, 
in less than an hour, the clergyman mixes with the. 
extremes of wretchedness and of riches. He leaves 
the bedside of the sick—perhaps the father of a family 
whose earnings were the main support of the house; 


A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


3 


he leaves the close, foetid atmosphere of the sick-room, 
and the miserable habitation of indigent fellow-crea¬ 
tures, and, in the course of sixty short minutes, he 
is breathing the perfumed odours of the drawing-room, 
or sitting down to one of those distracting banquets— 
ccence dubice —where the appetite and judgment can 
hardly agree. 

It may be, kind reader, that you belong to the class 
of mortals who are clothed in fine linen and fare sump¬ 
tuously every day, and whose acquaintance with the 
poor is very limited. Now, we are of the intermediate 
order just mentioned. Be good enough then to accept 
our arm; you have probably nothing to do; and, for 
an hour or so, take a bird’s eye view of a manufacturing 
population. And do not run away because the town is 
in Lancashire. 

The district, you see, is not very inviting ; the streets 
are narrow, and a heavy smoke hangs over the place 
to-day. The doors of the houses are, for the most 
part, wide open; some, you observe, have an appearance 
of cleanliness within, others are dirty in the extreme. 
Up those courts and alleys that run out of the main 
street we will not venture. The atmosphere may not 
suit your well-bred nostrils, and your delicate taste 
may revolt at the idea of a family of eight having only 
one bedroom. But where do all these children spring 
from that are sprawling about the streets ? We presume 
they had a like origin with yourself, though they are 
now left more to the liberal training of unrestrained 
nature. They grow and gain strength, nobody knows 


4 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


how; they push themselves upward through the dirt, like 
so many asparagus plants. Look at those girls of seven 
or eight years old carrying about their infant brothers 
or sisters, who are almost as large as themselves. Ask 
them what they are doing. 1 Nossing choild ’ (nursing 
the child) is the answer. 

1 Holla! my little girl, what are you about ? ’ 
Down she has fallen, child and all. No matter, she 
picks up the bits and away she runs. 

i Mother’s at street end.’ 

What are these young children wanting who are 
coming up so demurely ? They are going to make their 
‘ cortsies ’ to 1 the minister,’ after having done which 
they will run away and laugh, as if they had per¬ 
formed some wonderful feat.* Now, what on earth 
can those women be after at the street corner? They 
are engaged in very earnest conversation: something 
important must have occurred to draw them from home 
before twelve o’clock in the day. Ordinarily a small 
matter, or no matter at all, will bring them out for a 
discussion at any given hour; but now an important 
event engages them. Peggy Jenkinson has had twins, { a 
lad and a lass, fine childer, uncommon, and as like their 
father as beans is beans.’ Peggy has done the state 

* This is descriptive rather of one of the smaller Lancashire 
owns. In such a population as that of Manchester, the clerical 
individuality is merged in the large mass of workers and dealers. 
In many of our manufacturing districts, the lowly and reverent 
submission to ‘governors, spiritual pastors, and masters,’ which 
the Catechism enjoins, is for the most part ignored. 


A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


5 


some service: it is the second time that she has pre¬ 
sented her wondering, and perhaps alarmed, lord and 
master, who is a respectable spinner, with duplicate 
pledges of connubial bliss. That lusty woman there 
in the check bed-gown and linsey-woolsey petticoat, 
who seems to be leading the conversation with so much 
vivacity, is now as profound and oracular on confine¬ 
ments in general as though she were a priestess of the 
Lucinian mysteries. Then, after you have noticed the 
three or four hand-loom weavers, who are loitering 
about with their hands in their pockets; and the man 
with the donkey-cart, who is crying mussels and cockles 
and red herrings for sale ; and the ragged trader with 
the wheelbarrow, who exchanges salt for antiquated 
linen, or carries on the respectable barter (as it is 
termed) of 1 weight for weight,’—you have seen a 
fair specimen of the outdoor life of a manufacturing 
district. 

A manufacturing population is of a nomad character. 
A family changes its residence as easily as you change 
your coat. The young people go out from their old 
habitation in a morning, and return to dinner at a 
new one, as if nothing had happened. There is no 
carrying of sacred fire or clinging to household gods. 
But perhaps you would wish to see the indoor life 
of an operative’s dwelling. Not that opposite: the 
people are dippers; and, if you enter, that jaundiced 
woman with the can of dirty water in her hand may 
dash it in your face, out of zeal for her peculiar doc¬ 
trines. A Roman Catholic family lives at No. 21; our 


6 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


reception might be courteous, or it might be the reverse: 
we will not venture. Come in here ; we are acquainted 
with the household. You find everything tidy : the 
floor has been lately scoured and sanded ; the drawers 
are well polished; and the clock, with its painted dial- 
plate and clean mahogany case, bespeaks a considerable 
degree of regularity and providence. 

1 We’re rayther rough, sir, this morning; but will you 
not sit down ? ’ is the greeting of the mistress. A dinner of 
lobscouse is in preparation—a savoury dish, consisting 
of a little meat, many potatoes, and sundry onions, all 
mashed up and stewed together, after the fashion of Meg 
Merrilies. Of the family, the father, who is an over¬ 
looker, earns about 15s. a-week; two daughters, as 
steam-loom weavers, each 10s.; and a boy, a 1 short- 
timer,’ about 3s. The two little girls, who are creeping 
into the corner there, attend the day-school, and the 
youngest is in the cradle. The family of eight live with 
great comfort on 38s. a-week; the young women 
maintain an undoubted respectability of character, dress 
in a becoming manner, and, though upwards of twenty 
years old, attend regularly their Sunday-school and 
church. 

But lest you go away with a too favourable impres¬ 
sion of an operative’s household, please to step this way, 
and we will show you another picture of indoor economy. 
The family consists either of church-people, 1 if they 
go anywhere,’ or avowed Socialists, or plain, out¬ 
spoken Banters. The mother is about forty years old ; 
and at the present time, you observe, she has a black 


' A SKETCH FEOM NATURE. 


7 


eye. It was an accident in a slight skirmish with her 
husband, as they were taking some mild refreshment 
together. The pugnacious husband you do not see ; he 
is a hand-loom weaver by day, and a poacher by night, 
as that growling lurcher in the corner testifies. There 
are four ragged, vacant-looking children, roaming about 
the house, one of whom is very unconcernedly receiving 
a volley of vile names from its mother. In the corner 
there is a filthy shake-down chaff bed ; a few bottomless 
chairs and a three-legged table complete the furniture. 
Gracious heavens ! beneath that roof live a father and 
mother, and six children,—human beings without a 
humanised feeling, grovelling in the filth and sensuality 
of the swine, and exhibiting the ferocity of the savage. 

Between these two pictures, bear in mind, there 
are many domestic gradations. We must leave your 
imagination to fill up the hiatus. 

But you might wish to walk through one of the mills, 
and see the operatives at work. You have witnessed 
something of the kind at the Polytechnic, have you not ? 
We have just time to make a short inspection before 
one o’clock, when 1 the hands ’ leave for dinner. The 
factory before us, with the very tall chimney, will suit 
our purpose as being a well-regulated one. Within 
that enormous pile of buildings, eleven or twelve hun¬ 
dred persons are engaged in their daily employment. 
Under that roof the raw material, which was grown 
thousands of miles away, is manufactured into cloth, 
that it may be exported as an article of apparel to 
the very spot were it was cultivated. Come along 


8 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


to the engine-room, whence is derived all the power 
that moves every wheel, and spindle, and loom. How 
slowly and deliberately the leviathan works! Every 
motion of those alternating beams carries with it the 
power of two hundred horses, and yet the huge monster 
is as docile as an elephant. Sometimes he breaks 
from his keeper, and exhibits the Miltonic combi¬ 
nation of 

Water with fire 
In ruin reconciled; 

but most generally his steam-rumbling lungs testify by 
a friendly snort, that 

The waves and fire, old wranglers, have made truce 
To do men service. 

£ vv<Ip.ocrav yap, ovres %x ^ l<TT01 ' tr p^ v , 

irvp na\ QaXaaaa, Ka\ t a Trior’ iSci^drrjv.* 

We will now ascend to the topmost story of that 
large pile of buildings. This way: no, not by that 
circular staircase; there is a readier mode of ascent. 
Step into this box, and our friend here in the fustian 
jacket will place his finger on a spring, and we shall 
be raised up to the top by that cloud-compelling power 
we have just seen. Here we go; not perhaps in as 
elegant an apartment as that at the Regent’s Park 
Colosseum, but in one equally expeditious and safe. 
What a strange scene opens out to us at the top ! 
Wheels, rollers, straps, are around us, and below us, 
and above us. One overwhelming rattle stuns us for 

* JEschylus, Agamemnon, 633. 


A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


9 


a moment. But take care, my dear sir; move cautiously 
along the slippery floor : should the skirts of your sur- 
tout be caught between those revolving cylinders, you 
would assuredly be dragged in like that heap of cotton, 
and come out mince-meat. On your reappearance, we 
very much fear lest your metropolitan mother might 
not 1 know you were out.’ The process would un¬ 
deniably derange your linen, and might slightly dis¬ 
figure your features for your next ball in Park Lane :— 

Not the mother that you bore 
Would discern her offspring more; 

That one moment would leave no trace 
More of human form or face. 

In an incredibly brief space you would be rolled out 
into 1 the mangled Tybalt,’ so graphically sketched 
in poor Seymour’s 1 New Readings of Old Authors’— 

&< tt € jUTjSem 

yvwvai i8<5v t 5 olv &0Xiov Sepas* 

Here the cotton undergoes its first process—that of 
cleaning. You see those large bundles in the corner: 
the cotton is there as it was packed up thousands of 
miles away. Look at that young woman spreading 
it carefully out, that it may be gradually drawn between 
those revolving cylinders. In its passage it is winnowed 
from the dust that is bound up in it. This is called 
‘ scutching ; ’ and it must be put through three separate 
processes of this kind, before it can be sufficiently clean 


Sophocles, Electra, 755. 


10 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


for the further stages of its metamorphosis. Let us 
descend by this circular staircase : here you see the 
same material subjected to another dressing. After 
the cotton has been thoroughly cleaned, the fibres 
must be drawn out and arranged in lateral order. 
This is the work of the ‘ carding ’ machine. Then, 
in other rooms, the same material undergoes the pro¬ 
cesses of 1 drawing ’ and ‘ roving, ’ preparatory to its 
being spun into threads. But, if one may judge from 
your countenance, this jargon seems to be High Dutch 
to you. Scutching! carding! drawing! roving! We 
have, however, no time to spare: descend another 
flight of steps, and you behold ten thousand threads 
gathering round ten thousand spindles. Look at those 
self-acting 1 mules ’ and ‘ throstles : ’ they might be 
endowed with mind and volition : 

Spiritus intus alit, totamque infusa per artus 
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet— 

with seeming truth might it be said of those iron-nerved 
machines. How admirable is every arrangement! How 
calmly but accurately each operative goes through his 
or her particular duty ! How quickly the eye perceives 
any broken thread, and how deftly the fingers piece or 
replace it! Seventy years ago it would have taken 
300 men to do the work of that single set of fingers.* 

* Dr. Darwin, in his Botanic Garden, thus describes these 
processes as they were found in Arkwright’s establishment 
the Derwent: — 

First, with nice eye, emerging Naiads cull 
From leathery pods the vegetable wool; 



A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


11 


But let us go down into the 1 shed ’ (shade), where 
these threads are woven into cloth. What a mag¬ 
nificent sight! We enter a room, the end of which 
we can hardly see—it is so far off. It is on a ground- 
floor, and has no building above it. The windows are 
placed in the roof, that the weavers may have more 
light for their work. A truly lucus a non lucendo 
derivation for the term shade! Within it there are 
three or four hundred women, managing seven or 
eight hundred looms. Women, do you call them ? 
They seem to be young girls. It is the circumstance 
of their having pinafores tied round their throats that 
suggests the juvenile appearance; but they vary in age 
from fifteen to forty, as you will perceive, if you mark 
them closely. Each is engaged on her work : there is no 
laughing, or giggling, or child’s-play. Perhaps one here 
and there, recognising us as an acquaintance, may convey 
the intelligence to her neighbour with a nod and a smile; 
but she becomes very demure again when she fancies 
she is observed. She probably begins to smooth her 
hair with the comb she has always near her, or to 


With wiry teeth revolving cards release 

The tangled knots, and smooth the ravell’d fleece. 

Next moves the iron hand with fingers fine, 

Combs the wide card and forms th’ eternal line ; 
Slow with soft lips the whirling can acquires 
The tender skeins, and wraps in rising spires : 

With quicken’d pace successive rollers move, 

And these retain, and those extend, the rove; 

•Then fly the spokes, the rapid axles glow, 

While slowly circumvolves the labouring wheel below. 



12 


A MAN UFA CTUBING DISTRICT: 


tidy some portion of her dress; for most of them 
have a proper sense of their 1 becomings.’ But why 
is she stopping her loom ? Some thread has been 
broken, or some bad work made, during her absence of 
mind, and it is to be set right. The thread is pieced, 
a rod is touched, and the shuttle rattles on again, as 
if it were alternately shot from side to side out of two 
fifty-pounders. Everything is as orderly and neat as 
it can be, where there must necessarily be particles of 
dust and - cotton flying about. The ventilation is on the 
best principle, and the temperature not more than 65°. 
If there be a smell, it is the healthy one of oil. Such 
an employment for ten hours is not too fatiguing. The 
effort consists in mental attention, and in remaining 
long upon the legs. See that woman : a book is lying 
on her stool; she can take an occasional glance at some 
anecdote or narrative while her looms are going. 
Another, you remark, has her knitting by her side. 
These are very expert weavers. And, as you are 
a disciple of Lavater, do you not think that the in¬ 
telligent eyes and interesting faces of some around 
you will bear a favourable comparison with those 
of your London Graces ? But how is this ? The din 
of a thousand shuttles is yet ringing in our ears, but 
every loom is still in an instant. It is now one o’clock : 
the pinafores are thrown off; the shawls and bonnets 
hastily put on ; and they who were lately so busy, are all 
moving out in one continuous stream. Come along with 
the crowd : there is no rude remark to be heard; a mer- 
Gurial boy or two may perhaps be talking louder than 


A SKETCH FROM NATURE . 


13 


would beseem the deportment-room of a fashionable 
academy—that is all. The dense mass separates into 
its component parts as it reaches the street, to collect 
again at the same place about two o’clock. 

"We know not where the triumphs of the human mind 
are more distinctly traceable than within those four 
walls. We admire the classical scholar who can dig 
the rich ore out of the hidden mines of ancient learning. 
We reverence the astronomer, whose eye, guided by the 
laboured calculations of the mind, glances from this 
sublunary scene, and discovering a fresh planet among 
the unnumbered stars, ‘ lends the lyre of heaven another 
string.’ We pay our homage to the naturalist, who 
classifies the myriads of animated beings that inhabit 
our globe, or arranges the varied species of plants that 
cover its surface, or penetrates in thought to its very 
heart and centre; and out of all his investigations can 
gather undoubted evidence of the wisdom and goodness 
of the Creator. We honour the poet, whose heart yearns 
after the beautiful and true, and whose mind can suffuse 
its images and pictures with the radiance of its own 
sunlight. But the discoveries of a Newcomen and a 
Watt, and the inventions of a Cartwright, a Kay, a 
Wyatt, and an Arkwright, unillumined though they be 
by the many coloured hues of poetic fancy or the brilliant 
flashes of genius, have been more conducive than the 
productions of all besides to the increase of national 
greatness and the supply of human wants. Their 
thoughts have expanded into a practical and universal 
good; their ingenuity has triumphed over seeming 


14 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


impossibilities; and their triumphs, so far from resting 
in a theoretic truth, have produced the means of sub¬ 
sistence to thousands upon thousands, have opened 
a source of wealth and preeminence to our nation, and 
have been instrumental in diffusing England’s commerce 
and England’s civilisation to the remotest corners of 
the earth. 

Of the intellectual and moral condition of our opera¬ 
tive populations much has been written and said of late ,1 

u 


years; and the general conclusion has been that their 
educational and religious status is very low. We are 
not prepared to deny that great ignorance exists amongst 
them, and, as a consequence, a lamentable indifference 
to moral and religious duty. Of the labouring adults, 
especially the males, but a very small proportion attends 


any place of worship whatever. And in their most 
prosperous times, when trade is brisk, and work is 
abundant, and wages are high, their weekly earnings 
are mostly spent as they come to hand—often before. 
They who deposit in the Savings Bank are splendid 
exceptions. The general maxim of an operative is, 
‘ Sufficient unto the day are its enjoyments and its cares.’ 

And yet we incline to the belief that our manufac¬ 
turing districts—take them for all in all—though bearing 
a moral hue sufficiently dusky, have been portrayed in 
darker colours than they deserve. The Rev. John Clay. 
Chaplain to the Preston House of Correction—a gentle¬ 
man whose statistics are often quoted in high places, but 
whose courtesy and amiability are only known and appre¬ 
ciated by those who have the privilege of his friendship_ 





A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


15 


has given in his annual Reports many classifications of 
the state of crime throughout the country ; and we find 
from one of his statistical tables, that Lancashire, so far 
from being an exceptional black-a-moor, takes a fair po¬ 
sition in the moral gradation of the English counties.* 
In considering the aggregate amount of crime through¬ 
out a nation, it cannot be either uninteresting to the 
casual observer, or unprofitable to the legislator, to 
examine its relative proportion in the different occupa¬ 
tions of the people. Many probably, if asked among 
what class crime and ignorance are the most prevalent, 
would answer, among the factory operatives. But this 
is very far from the truth. Where persons are engaged 
in any well-regulated occupation from morning to night, 
there may be much ignorance, but there is little leisure 
for crime. On the other hand, where men are employed, 
as they term it, ‘ at a loose end,’ the temptations to evil 
are greatly increased. These assertions are fully borne 
out by facts. A table drawn up by Mr. Clay, from the 
1 Occupation Abstract ’ of the population returns, is in 
perfect consistence with these strong a priori probabili- 
ties.*j* Out of twenty trades, ostlers, bricklayers, colliers, 
plasterers, and labourers, are among the worst; factory 
operatives are the sixth in degree of excellence; and 
the female factory hands are the very best—better even 
than domestic servants of the same sex. We have been 
frequently amused at seeing a factory described by one 

* Report for 1844. 

t See Report for 1844. Also the Second Report of the Pen- 
tonville Prison. 


16 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


class of writers as somewhat worse than a Pandemonium, 
and by another as a trifle better than an Elysium. The 
descriptions of each party are equally unlike the truth. 
In a well-regulated mill, many of the young women 
might be envied by the wealthy for their high moral 
and religious tone of mind; some, again, maintain an 
unblemished character and a decent self-respect, with¬ 
out professing any very strict observance of religious 
duties; and others are doubtless very low both in pro¬ 
fession and practice. An outward decorum however is 
for the most part observed, while they are at work; and 
the grades of character are as strictly defined, when 
they are off work, as the grades of rank and title during 
a London season. 

The besetting sin of the poor is drunkenness. Not 
only is it an evil in itself, but it is the parent of almost 
every crime that comes before a court of justice. In 
Lancashire, at this moment, the phenomena of poverty 
and crime present a strange paradox. The several 
heads of the police force in the various divisions of the 
county concur in this particular, that the committals to 
prison were never so few in the same period as they 
have been for the last six months; and yet the distress 
of the operative was never known to be greater. How 
is this ? All the police superintendents give the same 
answer: with a decrease of wages, there has been 
a decrease of drunkenness ; and with a decrease of 
drunkenness, there has been a decrease of crime. And 
take a more circumscribed view: fix upon any filthy 
dwelling, or ragged children, or sluttish mother, or 



A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


17 


brutal father, and the chances are ten to one that these 
miseries have either sprung out of, or go hand in hand 
with, habitual intoxication. The beer-shop, the ale-house, 
and the gin-palace, are the Pandora’s box to the poor. 
Hunger, wretchedness, filth, disease, transgressions of 
the law in every shape, spring in broods out of these 
soul-destroying dens; and often even hope, that last 
solace of misery—‘hope that comes to all ’—deserts 
the mind of him who frequents them. 

A clerical friend of ours not long ago related to us 
an anecdote illustrative of ‘ the strong necessity of’ 
drinking under which some labour when the craving 
for it can be satisfied. He has an old parishioner whom 
he often sees too heavily laden for his legs to afford him 
trustworthy support. Jacob is a character in his way; 
he is a pensioner for military service, and is said to talk 
much over his cups about Wellington, Soult, Boney, 
and the ‘ Pensoolar ’ war, and to enliven his company 
with tales 

Of moving accidents, by flood and field ; 

Of hair-breath ’scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach. 

* O, Jacob, Jacob, tipsy again ! ’ our friend said to 
him one day, as he met him struggling along in a some¬ 
what serpentine course—in Lancashire phrase, ‘not 
going straight home.’ 

‘ Ay,’ replied Jacob, drawing himself up as well as 
he could into a regimental perpendicularity, and as¬ 
suming the air of a man who is supported by a good 
cause,—‘ ay, and yo’d ha bin drunk, parson, if yo’d 
bin wi’ us.’ 

VOL. I. 


c 


18 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


1 How so, Jacob ? how is that ? ’ 

‘ Why,’ explained the old soldier, with a commanding 
wave of the hand, and in a tone of triumph, ‘ it was 
gan * us, minister—it was gan us ; ’ and he staggered 
off, as if he had delivered himself of a most conclusive 
argument. Jacob, like a good mathematician, had an 
eye to the ‘ given quantity.’ 

Let us not however deal too hardly with the poor. 
Indifferent to their moral and social duties, as many 
of them undoubtedly are, they are not wholly without 
excuse. Brought up without the rudiments of secular 
learning, and in ignorance of Christian truth, they can 
with difficulty be induced to see the advantage of the 
one, or to feel the consolations of the other. Working: 
hard through the week, they claim the Sabbath as a 
day of leisure, and often turn it into a day of especial 
sin. Still there are many natural virtues in their dis¬ 
positions. The (j)v(TiKat aperai are broadly marked on 
their hearts. The difficulty lies in directing along a right 
channel the fountain of natural good; and the more so, 
inasmuch as it has already gathered mire and impurity 
in its course. Factory operatives are almost invariably 
kind to each other in distress. Learn this lesson from 
them, ye wealthy ! Being brothers and sisters in poverty, 
they oftyn pinch themselves to relieve the pressing wants 
of a neighbour. ‘ Certainly,’ says Bacon, ‘ virtue is like 

* Gan—given. This word, so far as we know, is peculiar to 
Bury and its neighbourhood. ‘ Gi ’n ’ is the more common term. 
Gan may be the abbreviation of gav’n. 


A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


19 


precious odours, most fragrant where they are incensed 
or crushedand frequently have we seen the present 
pressure of the times elicit the perfume of this virtue 
among the poor. An industrious family fully employed 
live in considerable comfort. But the manufacturer 
begins to 1 work to stock; ’ he can find no market for 
his goods. He is at length obliged to 1 start three days 
a week.’ The operative is now pinched; he returns 
home on the pay-night ‘ with the money light in his 
hand.’ He makes his way however as best he can— 
perhaps gets a trifle into debt with the shopkeeper : he 
is now, to use his own phrase, 1 running into bad.’ * 
But the worst has not yet come. Such is the commercial 
stagnation that the manufacturer must close his mill, or 
he would run the hazard of ruin. And now what 
becomes of 1 the hands ’ ? A family of eight, say, 
including parents, have to live without the regular 
income of a single farthing. Their Sunday clothes go 
one by one to the pawn-shop; and on these 1 advances’ 
they exist for a short time. Meanwhile they visit — 
but with great reluctance—the poor-office; and the 
‘ Board ’ allows them probably 6s. a week. But 
what are 6s. among so many? House-rent is 3s. 
weekly, and firing Is. 3c?.; so that Is. 9c?. remain for 
food. The clergyman, it may be, lends his aid; but 
he cannot keep the family, for he has fifty such cases 
under his charge. In this emergency the neighbours 

* This reminds us of the Greek phrase, hi p.u£ou epx^rai 
and the Latin, in pejus ruit. 


20 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


and Mends step in, and are frequently able, by timely 
assistance, to keep the candle of life burning till work 
is procured, and better days come. 

We may mention another characteristic of the poor 
—we hope we may rank it in the category of virtues— 
a grateful reliance on the clergyman in times of distress. 
Among such heterogeneous materials as constitute the 
mass of the lower orders, considerable numbers will 
ever be found whose especial calling it seems to be to 
abuse the Church and her ministers. Nay, we have seen 
a fair smattering of this leaven among parties who claim 
for themselves the title of ‘good Churchmen ’ par excel¬ 
lence. But, as a body, the poor are inclined to look up 
to the clergy with respect. They are most irregular 
church-goers; or, more properly, most regular church- 
absentees ; but they entertain a notion, after all, that 
the ministers of the Establishment have their interest 
at heart, and in difficulties are willing to place the most 
implicit confidence in their advice. 

It would surprise many of our fair readers were we to 
relate with what unreserved freedom the clergyman is 
admitted into the secrets of all family ailments. The 
poor seem to think that he is entitled to the full privi¬ 
lege of the doctor. We have ourselves made a point 
of declining—with many grateful acknowledgments— 
all the delicate investigations which old women would 
have pressed upon us. We have known clergymen 
indeed who, in addition to their legitimate responsibility, 
have assumed that of medical adviser; but we would 
dissuade the parson from meddling with the business 


A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


21 


of the apothecary. Sooner or later he comes to grief in 
his supererogatory profession. 

We have now in our mind a clerical friend whose 
great reputation in the art of healing has sometimes 
brought him into trouble. He has a country living— 
surrounded however by manufacturing towns, and in¬ 
habited chiefly by hand-loom weavers. He acts not 
only as their spiritual physician, but takes equal pride 
in administering to the relief of their bodily ailments. 
He is consulted by the old women far and wide, and is 
considered unrivalled in his knowledge of the ‘ Pharma¬ 
copoeia.’ Being an old soldier—a Waterloo officer—it 
is supposed that he picked up his skill somewhere abroad, 
or on the field of battle. Some go so far as to say that 
on one occasion he was shut up four-and-twenty hours 
with an Egyptian necromancer. Our own belief has 
ever been that he has acquired his fame as a physician 
simply by assuming a sagacious aspect, by using long 
words to the old women, and by the use of bread pills, 
with particular directions that they must be taken at 
certain hours. Well, and can you blame him for this? 
Have not many other eminent medical practitioners 
gained their high position by wise looks and innocuous 
pills ? An old lady, say, visits our friend in his surgery: 
she cannot tell what is the matter with her, or how she 
feels. ‘ Oh! ’ he observes, with a sage shake of the 
head, ‘you feel all-overish—witterly, titterly—just 
nohow—that’s how you feel, isn’t it ? ’ The matron 
declares that his description is perfect. He gives her a 
box of bread pills, one to be taken every three hours 


22 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


and in a short time she visits him again, expressing her 
gratitude, and declaring that he has saved her life. He 
is rather fond of tincture of rhubarb, to be sure, during 
the autumnal season ; and the little boys and girls run 
away and hide themselves when they see him approach¬ 
ing at that time, having a presentiment that he will dose 
them, and certainly having no stomach for his draughts. 
On the whole however, his nostrums, we are confident, 
are quite harmless. 

But how have his good purposes brought him to sorrow, 
you ask ? We heard the tale from his own mouth, and 
can vouch for its truth. One night last winter he was 
retiring to rest about eleven o’clock: his house was 
quiet, and his household in bed; when he was startled 
by a thundering rap at his door. 

* Holla ! who’s there ? ’ he inquired from his bedroom 
window. 

1 James Jackson,’ was the laconic answer. 1 Mother’s 
badly.’ 

‘Does your mother want me to night ? ’ 

1 Ay, directly ! ’ was the stubborn reply. 

Our friend was decidedly sulky as he contrasted the 
warmth of his bed with the temperature out of doors ; 
but, being too good a disciplinarian to break ecclesiasti¬ 
cal canons, he readjusted his coat and waistcoat, muffled 
up his throat, threw on his veteran roquelaure, and 
started off with his parishioner—a lubberly lad of nine¬ 
teen. It was a frosty, moonlight night; onward the two 
trudged over the crisp snow ; when, after walking about 
half a mile, our friend’s temper began to cool by degrees; 


A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


23 


and, turning round to his companion, he said, in his 
usual kind tone,— 

1 Well, and is your mother very poorly ? ’ 

‘ Ay, hoo’s* (she’s) vara badly at present.’ 

‘ But she is likely to get better, I hope ? ’ 

‘ Ay> a y> hoo’ll mend, happen (perhaps), after a bit.’ 

* What’s the matter with her, do you know ? ’ 

‘ O, ay, I know. Hoo’s labboring (in labour).’ 

1 Labboring! labboring ! ’ shrieked our friend, turning 
round fiercely upon his fellow-traveller. ‘ What do you 
mean by coming for me? Labboring S go for Dr.Potts this 
instant. Labboring! Am I a man-midwife, think you ? ’ 

‘Well, well,’ was the imperturbable reply. ‘Folks 
say ye’re vara skilfu’ in chymistering, and’—scratching 
his head, and looking his pastor imploringly in the face 
—‘a labbor’s ten and sixpence !’f 

* The Lancashire ‘ hoo ’ is said to be simply the Anglo-Saxon 
feminine of the pronoun ‘he,’ namely ‘heo,’ supposed to have 
been pronounced ‘ hoo.’ 

f [Eheu, fugaces labuntur anni ! It is now seventeen years 
since this article was written ; and during that time how many 
friends and acquaintances have passed from this earthly scene! 
The Rev. Gilmour Robinson, of Tockholes in the parish of 
Blackburn, who is here referred to, has gone to his rest. He 
was a bachelor, with some peculiarities, but of a truly kind 
spirit towards the poor. He will long be remembered with 
gratitude by the inhabitants of Tockholes. He was thrown 
into great perturbation on reading these anecdotes of himself. 
He felt convinced at first that some of his matronly patients had 
been revealing the secrets of his—not * prison-house,’ but surgery. 
To the last, we are told, his thoughts constantly oscillated 
between the parish of Tockholes and the plains of Waterloo. 
—1866.] 


24 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


Patience under suffering, again, is a broadly-marked 
characteristic of the poor. Though perhaps more the 
result of habit than reflection, it still deserves our 
warmest admiration. They only who associate with the 
lower orders, and see them in their secret struggles after 
bare existence, can tell how much they have to endure 
in times of commercial depression. It would be an ap¬ 
palling spectacle, could we behold in one mass the aggre¬ 
gate of human suffering among the Lancashire poor 
during the last eight months. Provisions of all kinds 
at famine prices, and the operatives unemployed one- 
half their time ! The potato has never been seen at their 
tables for many months. Butchers’ meat, ham, and bacon 
have been equally unattainable. Oatmeal-porridge, 
milk, tea greatly diluted, and bread thinly covered with 
butter, have been their chief articles of food. And at 
the time of our writing their condition was never worse. 
‘We’re like to clem hard’ (we are obliged to suffer 
much hunger), was the unsophisticated remark of a 
little girl to us a few days ago.* And yet they have 
hitherto borne their sufferings with singular endurance. 
Their present conduct is in remarkable contrast with 

* [This article appeared, January 1848. ‘We’ll clem it out,’ 
is a common expression among the operatives in times of distress, 
meaning that they will endure their shortness of food till better 
times come, however painful it may be to them. 

The word ‘ clem ’ is used by our old English writers, such as 
Marston, Massinger, and Ben Jonson: 

Hard is the choice, 

When valiant men must eat their arms or clem.— Joftson. 

1866 .] 


A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


25 


their turbulence of 1842. Then their privations were 
comparatively trifling; and yet, from the instigation of 
desperate men, they rose against the manufacturer, jeo¬ 
pardised his property, desecrated churches, took forcible 
possession of populous towns, and resisted even unto 
blood. If the present difficulties continue, we know not 
indeed to what the duns urgens in rebus egestas may 
impel the people; but as yet we see no shadows of 
coming disorder. Hardly pressed as the operative is, he 
is fully aware that his master is suffering no less severely; 
he concludes that the ruin of the manufacturer must be 
to his own loss; he sees that the interests of the one are 
bound up in the interests of the other ; and, understand¬ 
ing this, he possesses his soul in patience, waiting for 
better times. And that those times be not far distant, 
is our fervent hope and sincere prayer ! 

In speaking of the praiseworthy endurance of the 
distressed operative, our remarks, be it understood, are 
not intended to apply universally. There are noisy 
idlers and mischief-making mouthers in every commu¬ 
nity, however small. Herein lies the mistake of almost 
all the writers on our manufacturing population. They 
deduce an universal conclusion from the induction of a 
few facts, and that conclusion probably a preconceived 
one. Take, for instance, Dr. Cooke Taylor’s 4 Notes of 
a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire,’ 
written in 1842. Every suffering operative is indis¬ 
criminately an obj ect of admiration, and the stern endu¬ 
rance of the Saxon would bear a favourable comparison 
with the iron-hearted Spartan dying on his shield. 


26 


A MANUFACTUBING BISTBICT: 


Every noisy Chartist is invested with the dignity of a 
noble-minded patriot struggling for the freedom of his 
country.* The Corn law is the ogre that stops the loom, 
locks up food, and devours the people. Dr. C. Taylor 
is addressing Archbishop Whately. Has the Doctor 
ever read the 1 Fallacies ’ of his friend ? If our Oxford 
memory does not deceive us, there is one classed under 
the head of ‘ Undue Assumption ’—the logical non causa 
pro causa. Into this has the doctor fallen. The restric¬ 
tions on' com are removed ; but trade is far more pro¬ 
strated than in 1842. That the repeal of the Corn law 
will conduce eventually to the extension of commerce 
and the increase of domestic comforts we have reason to 
believe. But, to our mind, the great fallacy consists in 
attributing our commercial stagnations to any existing 
law. Examine the instances of manufacturing depres¬ 
sion which have recurred at intervals during the last 
thirty years, and you will find that they are almost 
universally traceable to incidental circumstances over 
which the law, as it exists, has but little influence. 
And here lies the great danger of fixing upon any ob¬ 
noxious statute, and holding it up as the sole cause of 

* At page 72, the doctor gives a. very graphic anecdote, which, 
though descriptive of distress, cannot but excite a smile. On 
his road to Colne—one of the most disorderly towns in Lan¬ 
cashire, by the way—he was stopped by seven determined opera¬ 
tives, who asked for relief; and, when he offered them a shilling, 
it was refused till the ‘promise to pay’ of one of the seven had 
been given. It beats hollow the interesting scene of a similar 
kind between the resolutely-honest Mr. Tigg and the confiding 
Tom Pinch. 


A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


27 


distress: inasmuch as the passions of an uneducated 
people are far more likely to break forth into outrage, 
when they are concentrated on a single point which 
they are led to regard as the fountain-head of all their 
misery. 

When Dr. Dalton was presented to William IV., his 
majesty asked him whether Lancashire was quiet—as 
though it were a district in some remote part of his 
dominions that existed in a chronic state of uneasiness 
and disaffection. Now, in reality, the manufacturing 
operatives are by no means a turbulent body, fhey 
have their occasional strikes and turn-outs, it is true, 
but it is quite necessary for them to protect their own 
interests. If they have a fair amount of work, and their 
earnings are reasonable, they are far from being discon¬ 
tented and troublesome. And indeed when a spirit of 
disaffection has broken out into acts of violence, it has 
been rather at the instigation of a few mischievous leaders 
than from any spontaneity of feeling. Orators, frequently 
Irish, are abundant in the class—lazy fellows, who are 
never satisfied but with a grievance, and whose love of 
talk is in an inverse ratio to their love of work. But 
in their normal frame of mind, the mill-workers are 
pacific and contented. What Burns says of the Scotch 
peasantry may with equal truth be said of them : 

Ye maist wad think, a wee touch langer, 

And they maun starve o’ cauld and hunger; 

But, how it comes, I never kenn’d yet, 

* They ’re maistly wonderfu’ contented. 

Let us give an illustration of Lancashire passive 


28 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


endurance, containing as it does a good moral; though 
we by no means warrant the male population generally 
to be endowed with the same philosophic self-restraint 
under provocation as the hero of our tale. In the 
neighbourhood of Kochdale, it happened that a big, 
hulking collier, six feet two in his stockings, had an 
extremely diminutive wife. 




So Venus wills, whose power controls 
The fond affections of our souls; 

With sportive cruelty she hinds 
Unequal forms, unequal minds.* 

But, what was more singular, it was currently reported 
that the said little woman, being in country dialect a 
spreet, j - was in the habit of thrashing her husband. 

1 John,’ said his master to him one day, 1 they really 
say that your wife beats you. Is it true V 

‘Yoy,’ drawled John, with most provoking coolness. 

‘ Yoy !’ responded the master, with indignation. ‘What 
do you mean, you lout ? A great thumping fellow like 
you, as strong as a steam-engine or an elephant, to let a 
little woman like your wife thrash you ! What a block¬ 
head you must be !’ 

1 Whoy, whoy,’ was the patient answer, 1 it ple-ases 
hor, maester, an’ it does me no hort!’ 


* Francis. 

Sic visum Veneri; cui placet impares 
Formas atque animos sub juga ahenea 
Ssevo mittere cum joco. 

Hor. Car. i. 33, 10. 

f From ‘ sprite ’ probably, or ‘ spirit.’ 



A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


29 


Here now was a true philosopher,—one who had 
never heard of the Academic or Stoic rules, but from 
his natural powers had practically solved the great 
Aristotelic problem upon the nature of Happiness. 
What a store of pent-up enjoyment should we diffuse 
through the world, if, in all our dealings with our 
neighbours, we kept in mind the collier’s answer : ‘ It 
ple-ases hor, an’ does me no hort! ’ * 

Our description of the manufacturing classes would 
be imperfect, without some reference to the peculiarities 
of their dialect. Their vocabulary is very circumscribed. 
It contains a strong dash of the Saxon, with a consider¬ 
able mixture of those nondescript words which are 
traceable to no root. It is however full of energy and 
expression. When some one more aspiring among them 
ventures upon classical ground, there is great danger of 
a fall. It is not unusual for us to be called suddenly to 
an old woman grievously ill with ‘ spavins ’ (spasms) in 
the stomach, or ‘ palpalation ’ (palpitation) of the heart, 
or ‘ conflagration ’ (inflammation) of the inside. 

‘ How is Jane ? ’ we inquired of a loquacious old lady 
the other day. ‘ How is your daughter ? What did 
the doctor say of her complaint ? ’ 

1 Why, sir,’ she answered, ‘he said, sir, she was in a 
verypthysical (critical) way, indeed, sir—verypthysical.’ 

It is well therefore to use much plainness of speech 
in your intercourse with the poor. Not perhaps that 
this, in many cases, is at all required; but in some you 

* [Sdfne may remember that the Earl of Derby created much 
amusement in the House of Lords by quoting this anecdote.—1866.] 


30 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


can only make yourself intelligible by descending to 
tbeir level. 

‘ You are sadly troubled with a cough,’ we once said 
to a very old woman whom we visited. She was evi¬ 
dently in doubt about our meaning, when a daughter 
stepped up, and explained to her in more vernacular 
idiom— 

‘ He says as yo’re fearfully haggled wi’ a haust.’ 

This last is a very familiar word among the lower 
orders, and is, we believe, of Anglo-Saxon derivation. 

‘ I hausts, mon,’ said a vigorous old man to us the 
other day,— 1 1 hausts most undeniable, and spits un¬ 
common.’ 

Again, in ordinary discourse with the poor, it is 
safest to avoid all flights of metaphor. We heard of a 
young clergyman not long ago being suddenly pulled 
down in his soarings of fancy : 

‘ I fear, my friend,’ he said to a poor weaver, to whose 
bedside he had been summoned,—‘ I fear I must address 
you in the language that was addressed to King Heze- 
kiah, “ Set thine house in order ; for thou shalt die, and 
not live.” ’ 

‘ Well,’ was the man’s reply, as he rose languidly on 
his elbow, and pointed with his finger, ‘ I think it’s o’ 
reet, but for a brick as is out behint that cupboard.’ 

Sometimes from this species of misconception a ludic- *» 
rous idea is suggested to the clergyman’s mind, wfflen 
he least wishes one to intrude. 

‘ Resign yourself under your affliction, ma’am,’ one 
of our friends not long ago said to a sick parishioner. 


A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


31 


‘ be patient and trustful; you are in the hands of the 
good Physician, you know ? ’ 

‘Ay, ay,’ she replied innocently, ‘ Dr. Jackson is said 
to be a skilfu’ mon.' 

We are assured that the following incident occurred 
to a Manchester clergyman in one of his visits to an 
old woman in her sickness. He had been to Oldham, 
and afterwards called upon his patient. She was a per¬ 
son on whom he could make no impression whatever, 
but remained uninterested and impassive under all his 
efforts to rouse and instruct her. A thought suddenly 
came into his mind that he would try a new method 
with her : so, after stating that he had been at Oldham 
and thus detained a short time, he began by giving her 
the most glowing description of the new Jerusalem as 
pourtrayed by St. John in the Apocalypse; when at 
length she seemed to be aroused, and looking earnestly 
at him, she said with a degree of emotion never before 
exhibited by her,—‘ Eh, for sure, and dud ye see o’ that 
at Owdham ? I’zowks, but it mon ha’ bin grand ! I 
wish I’d bin wi’ ye.’. 

Many of the homely words in use among the Lan¬ 
cashire poor are of the purest and most unadulterated 
Saxon : they were the household expressions of all classes 
in England in the days of good Queen Bess, ere foreign 
idioms had hybridised our language. ‘ Come, get 
agate,’ * is a very familiar expression. ‘ I’ll put my neif f 

* Agate—a-gait—or, a-going: get a-going, or begin. The 
mill hands speak of ‘ gating ’ a loom—that is, setting it agoing. 

f ‘ Give me your neif, monsieur.’— Midsummer Night's Bream. 

* Sweet knight, I kiss thy neif! ’— Henry IV. 


32 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


i’ tliy face,’ is a threat of dangerous import. The term 
‘ nesh,’ signifying tender and delicate, which is a very 
common one in the manufacturing districts, is found in 
the very oldest publications in the English language.* 
When we hear the expression, 1 1 axed him what he 
wanted,’ it sounds like a vulgarism; and yet it is the 
old use of the verb still lingering among us.j" The old 
term ‘wench,’ which in the higher circles conveys a 
somewhat indelicate idea, is still used in parts of 
Lancashire as expressive simply of a female, whether 
young or old. A nonconformist minister was once 
preaching a Sunday School charity sermon in the neigh¬ 
bourhood of Oldham from the text, ‘ Bless the lads.’! 
Whenever the stream of his eloquence began to run dry, 
and ideas failed him, he exclaimed with much energy 
and concurrent thumps, ‘ Bless the lads ! bless the lads !b 
At last an old woman who was sitting just below the 
pulpit, losing patience and being desirous of vindicating 
her sex, looked up, and asked with some asperity— 

‘ Well, and what ha’n th’ wenches done, minister ? ’ 

A Rochdale clergyman on one occasion received a 
hasty summons to baptize a child in a portion of his 
district not the most intellectually enlightened. 

‘ What name do you intend to give the baby ? ’ he 
asked. 

1 Whoy,’ answered the father, in some surprise, ‘ we 
thowt ye’d ha’ browt one wi’ ye.’ 

‘Very well—very well—then we’ll call the child 

* ‘ His herte is tender and neshe.’— Chaucer. 
f ‘ What axen men to have ? ’— Ibid. 


A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


33 


William—after his most gracious majesty,’—suggested 
the pastor; and he proceeded with the ceremony. 

No sooner had he got to the street-end on his return, • 
than he heard hasty footsteps behind him, and the fol¬ 
lowing imperative order, given in as high a key as over¬ 
tasked lungs would allow:—‘ Holla ! yo mun come 
back : yo mun do it ow’re age-an : it’s a wench !—it’s a 
wench l’ 

Perhaps nowhere in Her Majesty’s dominions did she 
receive a warmer welcome than in Lancashire; and yet 
we know not how far she might have considered herself 
complimented, if she had heard herself, as we heard her, 
styled ‘ a tidy-looking little wench.’ * * * § The Prince-Con¬ 
sort was held by the ladies to be ‘a gradely f clever 
chap, barring his upper lip, which was vast fou’.’ $ The 
royal children were admired; but one loquacious dame 
told us that her * Sally and Johnny, when they had 
donned § their Sunday clothes, was welly (well-nigh) as 

* The term ‘ tidy ’ is of very general applicability among the 
manufacturing classes. Their wages are tidy; their health is 
tidy; altogether, they are getting on tidy. 

f It expresses something superlative: probably from ‘ gradu¬ 
ally,’ as implying progress towards completion; or, it may be, 
from ‘ greatly.’ 

+ ‘Clever’ signifies tall—well-looking—implying capability 
of body rather than of mind. [This was before the moustache 
movement.—1866.] 

§ The terms ‘ don,’ do-on, and ‘doff,’ do-off, are very common 
among the poor. * Then up he rose and donned his clothes.’— 
Hamlet. ‘ To doff their dire distresses.’— Macbeth. ‘ Thou 
wear a lion’s hide ! doff it for shame ! ’— King John. 


VOL. I. 


D 


34 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


smart.’ The word fettle * is almost of universal appli¬ 
cation : it answers to the American fix. It is used as a 
substantive: ‘He’s i’ rare fettle ’ (condition of body). 
It is used as a verb : ‘ I’ll fettle it up belive ’ f (repair 
it shortly). And, in the neighbourhood of Rochdale, 
where the Lancashire dialect is in perfection, and the 
up-and-down style of fighting still flourishes, we have 
been told that it is not uncommon to hear a bystander 
cheer on the champion who has floored his antagonist, 
with the gentle encouragement, ‘ Fettle his mewath 
(mouth) with a brick! ’ j: We have heard the word 
derived from facio , as ‘effectual.’ Dr. Johnson says it 
has the same root as ‘feel.’ We have a suspicion that 
the Doctor has hit the mark, though his shot is evidently 
a random one. The termination ‘ tie ’ must have its 
distinctive meaning, as Horne Tooke and other etymo¬ 
logists have shown to be the case in certain forms of the 
ultimate. Now, this seems to be no other than ‘ til ’ or 
‘ to.’ Fettle therefore may be compounded of feel-til; 
just as settle, a sofa, may be from seat-til ;|| and in like 

* ‘ When your master is most busy in company, come in, 
and pretend to fettle about the room’.—D ean Swift. ‘ Fettleth 
to the war.’—B ishop Hall. 

f By that same way the direful dames do drive 
Their mournful chariot, filled with rusty blood, 

And down to Pluto’s house are come belive. — Faery Queen . 

J Asa specimen of Rochdale manners: —‘Heigh, Jack, do’st 
know that felly on th’ gray tit ? ’ a lad of seventeen was heard 
to say to his companion. ‘Noa,’ was the reply. ‘Then,’re¬ 
sponded the other, * clod a stean [stone] at him.’ 

|| The word ‘ dom-setl,’ judgment-seat, occurs in the ‘ Saxon 
Chronicle,’ a.d. 796. 


A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


35 


manner, we apprehend, may words of the same termina¬ 
tion generally be compounded.* 

* [The Rev. William Gaskell, M.A., who has made the derivation 
of Lancashire words a subject of study, has come to the conclu¬ 
sion that many of them have their origin in the ancient British 
language; and in proof of this he shows how often they are 
found to have the same roots, and indeed to be the same in 
structure as the Welsh. Take, for instance, the word ‘ cob.’ 
‘ This,’ writes Mr. Gaskell, ‘ is used by Lancashire men both as a 
verb and a substantive. They call a round lump of coal a “ cob o’ 
coal,” and distinguish the larger pieces from the small as “ cob- 
coal.” This may be derived from the Welsh “ co,” a rounding, 
from which comes “ cub,” a mass. About the verb there can be 
less doubt. In Welsh, “cobiaw” is to strike or thump ; and this 
is the meaning which it has in Lancashire.’ (‘ Two Lectures on 
the Lancashire Dialect,’ by the Rev. William Gaskell, M.A. 
1854.) We have heard of a local preacher enforcing the 
doctrine of final causes by the following graphic illustration: — 
‘ Yo may axe,’ he said, ‘ how it is as coal lies so deep. Why 
shouldn’t it be at th’ top o’ th’ greawnd? Why, dunno yo see, 
if it wur at th’ top, yo women would be running away wi’ o’ th’ 
cobs fost.’—‘Another Welsh word,’ says Mr. Gaskell, ‘ is “ tacklu,” 
to put in order, to set right, to dress. And a Lancashire man 
talks of “tackling ” a horse, for harnessing it; and he says, “ I ’ll 
tackle the felly; ” meaning, I ’ll set him right, generally by what 
he calls “giving him a dressing.”’ (‘ Two Lectures,’ &c.) The 
word is of very common use in Lancashire, and is the same, we 
apprehend, as that applied to the rigging of a ship. A clergy¬ 
man related to us an incident in connection with which he 
heard the term, to the discomposure of his serious thoughts. 
After administering the Communion to an old lady, he was wrap¬ 
ping up the cup and paten he had used, when her husband, after 
looking awhile steadily at the apparatus, said in a tone of admi¬ 
ration, * I tell ye what, maester, that’s uncommon nice tackle for 
th’ job ’—the remark not savouring of irreverence in the slightest 

d 2 


36 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


Sometimes doubtless our natural fondness for tracing 
up the lineage of words, as of families, misleads us. 
We heard not long ago a classical scholar derive the 
term anenstf rom evavriov :* and we were once amused 
at a learned gentleman finding a Saxon root for the mo¬ 
dern bagging Many Lancashire phrases are of late origin, 
springing out of the occupations, habits, and customs of 
the people. The verb to mill , J to beat, is in very 
general use : indeed, from the many terms expressive 
of thrashing and fighting among us, it may be inferred, 
we fear, that Lancashire is a pugnacious county. There 
is a word now used from the sunny banks of the 
Ganges to the frozen shores of Canada—it has be¬ 
come incorporated into the English language—namely, 

degree, but being simply the expression of a mechanical mind.— 

1866 .] 

* [Will not any Lancashire man be amused to hear that 
Dr. Trench makes our common word ‘ topper ’ a compound of 
toto o'perel (‘English Past and Present.’)—1866.] 

t ‘ Baggin,’ means the afternoon meal, or ‘ drinking.’ It is 
so called, we suppose, from the food being carried in a bag. 
Hence the common phrase ‘getting the bag,’ being sent away 
bag and baggage. We once heard two men in conversation, as 
they were inspecting some wax-work figures. * Who’s that ? ’ 
asked one, pointing to a representation of Louis-Philippe. 

‘ Why,’ replied the other, ‘ it’s that French chap as geet th’ 
bag.’ 

t The word ‘ mill’ is taken, no doubt, from the beating in the 
fulling-mill. * What’s up ? ’ we heard one man inquiring of 
another a few days ago, as they met in the street. ‘ 0, nowt,’ 
was the answer, ‘nobbut (nothing but) a chap milling his wife ; 
and the respondent walked away unconcernedly, perhaps mutter¬ 
ing to himself, ‘ Sarves her reet.’ 


A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


37 


‘ teetotaland yet our material eyes have rested upon its 
originator. We looked on him, not with the reverence 
that we should have done on a Cadmus or a Columbus, 
but certainly not without respect. He had exhibited 
no powers of invention, for the word sprang out of an 
accident. He was a man in humble circumstances; 
and when the Temperance movement commenced, he 
entered warmly into the lists in its support. He carried 
his views on the subject further than many ; and when 
he addressed the people, he strongly advocated total 
abstinence from intoxicating liquors. Unfortunately, or 
fortunately, he stammered; and, being emphatic on the 
word total, he mostly pronounced it t-t-total. What 
an admirable puzzle the term will be for some etymolo¬ 
gist a century hence ! The name of 1 navvy ’ is now al¬ 
most as general as that of 1 tee-totaler.’ The word is 
an abbreviation of 1 navigator ; ’ not that these characters 
ever ploughed the main, or adventured on voyages of 
discovery; but they were the workmen who cut the 
navigable canals which were extensively formed some 
half-century ago. When therefore the railway mania 
sprang up, a class of men arose with every characteristic 
of the old ‘ navvy,’ and nobody thought it worth while 
to change the name.* 

We know how difficult it is to convey an accurate idea 

* [Mr. Smiles, in his Life of Stephenson, gives this origin to 
the word, which is undoubtedly the correct one. We have just 
been amused to see that a writer in Chambers's Journal disputes 
his accuracy, and derives ‘ navvy ’ from some Danish or Norse 
term, ‘Naabbi,’ signifying ‘neighbour.’—1866.] 


38 


A MANUFACTURING DISTRICT: 


of the manufacturing classes to the mind of a person 
who has never resided among them. The descriptions 
of them by casual visitors are mostly in extremes : the 
pictures are much larger than life. This is easily ac¬ 
counted for. Among the operatives there are greater 
extremes of good and evil than in a rural population: 
in the average, the difference would be found very 
trifling. In order therefore to arrive at an accurate 
estimate of their qualities, your induction of facts must 
be very extended; your acquaintance with their habits 
must be at the same time very minute and very enlarged. 
Of manufacturing towns themselves, the characteristics 
are widely different. Some are marked by a general 
cleanliness and moral order; others are notorious only 
for turbulence and filth. In the same town, again, 
there are mills which have not two properties in common 
so far as relates to their moral or social condition. One 
belongs to a master who has a proper sense of his re¬ 
sponsibility, and, while he provides everything requisite 
for the comfort and well-being of his work-people, in¬ 
sists at the same time that they in their turn shall observe 
a certain degree of decency and order in their general 
behaviour. Another is owned by some sordid fellow (one 
of a class, we are happy to believe, now on the decrease) 
who regards his ‘hands’ in the same light as his iron 
machinery, and if they have only turned off so much 
work on a Saturday night, cares not a straw though they 
be swine-drunk throughout the Sunday. In the same 
factory, again, the difference of character among the 
operatives is as great as light and darkness. Some of 


A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


39 


the working-class might be fit models for the idle rich, 
while others are lost to every gentle feeling of onr nature. 
Wherefore, in examining into the social, intellectual, 
and moral condition of the manufacturing classes, the 
danger is, lest a stranger should arrive at some sweeping 
conclusion which may be correct from his own limited 
induction, but which would represent the whole truth as 
accurately as a brick of Babylon would represent the 
entirety of that departed city. 

A noble county, be assured, is that of Lancaster, not¬ 
withstanding its tall chimneys, and black-mouthed coal¬ 
pits, and smoke-begrimed faces, and swarthy artizans, 
and cotton-covered operatives. The Southern shrinks 
from it as a pestilence. The Londoner would almost 
as soon be stuck up to the neck in a Tipperary bog, as 
be fixed in a manufacturing town. But, over the wide 
world, point out to us a district of the same extent as 
Lancashire with the same properties of greatness. In 
this much-maligned county there are fields as green, 
and landscapes as fair, as eye can rest on. Nowhere is 
agriculture, in its science and practice, advancing more 
rapidly. From beneath its surface coal is dug out by 
brawny arms to turn the machinery of the monster 
factory, and to cheer the fireside of the humble cottage. 
From its mountain-sides the stone is quarried in abun¬ 
dance. Along its picturesque valleys the dancing water¬ 
fall is made available for turning the wheels of the mill, 
and the wild beauties of nature are trained to the service 
of the' practical and useful. ^Railways intersect the 
county like net-work, affording unusual facilities of tran- 


40 


A SKETCH FROM NATURE. 


sit. On its rivers float the argosies of a hundred lands; 
and from its ports are borne its manufactures to the 
four corners of the earth. Its inhabitants are charac¬ 
terised by a sterling intellect of Saxon parentage, polished 
and whetted by the daily attrition of commercial dealings. 
Many a strong mind has struggled up from the weaver’s 
loom, till it has enriched the literature of the day, or in¬ 
creased the comforts of man by its practical inventions. 
A county indeed not without its failings; but still 
a county ‘ whose merchants are princes,’ whose women 
are said to be ‘witches,’ and whose people generally, 
though rough and gnarled in their outside bark, are 
in the main sound at the core ! 



II. 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS,—THE 
EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 


In the preceding essay, we took a general view of the 
social, intellectual, and moral condition of the manu¬ 
facturing classes. Our duty was an easy one; our 
task went no further than a simple statement of what 
our own eyes had witnessed and others had described. 
Very different is the subject which we now propose to 
ourselves. Consider the numbers that ‘have gathered 
and are gathering into our crowded towns—beings capa¬ 
ble of enjoyment, who once, it may be, luxuriated in 
the green fields, and felt the inspiration of the 1 incense¬ 
breathing morn,’ but are now ‘ cabined, cribbed, con¬ 
fined,’ in some dark cellar or noisome alley; reflect 
upon the multitudes who have grown up from infancy 
in these cheerless, lightless, airless dwellings; bear in 
mind that immortal beings—careless, ignorant, sinful— 
are passing, generation after generation, out of these 
dark abodes into the still darker home that awaits 
the rich as well as poor: remember too that their 


42 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


places are not left vacant, but filled up by others more in 
number, and that the human mass is increasing in a ratio 
that is fearful!—think of all this, and then say whether 
he who approaches the question of their moral improve¬ 
ment and social elevation is not addressing himself to a 
point the most important of all to the happiness of 
individuals, the order of society, and the well-being 
of the empire at large ? 

Of all the subjects which have been discussed of late 
years, none has occupied more general attention than 
that of education among the poor. As to the character 
it ought to assume, the means whereby it is to be sup¬ 
ported, and the nature of the subjects it should embrace, 
perhaps no question has given rise to greater diversity 
of sentiment; as to its political importance and per¬ 
sonal advantages, there is no point on which men are 
so universally agreed. The minister of state has at 
length discovered that all his measures must be futile, 
unless the mind of the great human mass be enlightened 
to distinguish truth, to acknowledge justice, and to obey 
law. The minister of the gospel understands that the 
awakening of mind and expansion of heart here below 
is that only spring-time process whereby these faculties 
can be prepared for their full development in a future 
existence. The Christian magistrate is led from his 
own experience to ask the question of the heathen,— 

Quid leges, sine moribus 
Vanse, proficiunt ? * 

The manufacturer perceives how dangerous it is for 
* Hor : Odes, III. xxiv. 36. 




THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 43 


the mighty body of a people to awake to the conscious¬ 
ness of a giant’s power without the intellect of a child 
to regulate and direct it. All classes have been brought 
to acknowledge the brief but comprehensive truth of 
the wise man,—‘ That the soul be without knowledge, 
it is not good.’ Within the last half-century, the 
heaving of the mindless behemoth has startled many a 
stout heart. And the spirit of the closing year* exhorts 
us, by the anarchy and confusion that have followed 
its track, to gird ourselves for the struggle against the 
powers of darkness, and to quit ourselves like men. 

Our assertion may seem somewhat conceited, but we 
venture to affirm that our present educational difficulties 
and educational prospects have seldom been described 
in their true colours, and are at this moment but very 
imperfectly understood. Pamphlets we have had in 
abundance, in most instances characterised by ingenuity 
and Christian feeling. But not one of them all seems 
to us to have grappled with the real difficulties of the 
subject. They have skimmed lightly over the deeply- 
rooted sore; they have begun with the statistics of 
school-inspectors and prison-chaplains, filled up the 
body of their dissertations with figures and finance, and 
closed in a cloud of oratorical smoke, as if the magazine 
had exploded and nothing more remained than for the 
invading army to enter and take possession of the de¬ 
fenceless citadel. 

We.would then invite the reader’s attention for 


[The year 1848.—1866.] 


44 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


awhile, to the subject of education as bearing upon 
the condition of the operative classes. And here, re- j 
member, we are not speaking of an agricultural popu¬ 
lation, nor of the order of shopkeepers in towns, but of 
that class among which education is especially needed, 
and from which the absence of it is especially to be 1 
dreaded—the lowest portion of the operative poor. 

National Schools. 

We tieed not inform the reader, if connected in any 
measure with a manufacturing district, that at nine 
years of age children are admitted into a cotton factory 
as * short-timers ; ’ that, so long as they work the limited 
period, they are sent to school one-half of each day, 
Saturday excepted; and that at the age o'f thirteen, 
they are admitted to employment for the full num¬ 
ber of the factory hours. Now, in a purely manu¬ 
facturing district, it may be asserted without fear of 
contradiction, that of those who enter a mill as opera¬ 
tives, nineteen out of twenty commence ' as 1 short- 
timers.’ These are, for the most part, sent to the 
National school for the daily instruction of three hours, 
which the law enforces. Whether the arrangement be 
a good one may be questioned; but this at least is 
certain, that in many districts the National schools 
would be very thinly attended without these short- 
timers. Amongst such a population, then, a National 
school for boys may consist of some hundred short- 
timers, sixty below nine years of age, and probably 
a dozen not engaged in factory-work. 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 45 


Now, of these, observe, not one is above thirteen; 
a large proportion attend only one-half the day, and the 
remainder are very young. Of the short-timers, many 
set their foot within a school for the first time in their 
lives when they are compelled by the law,—children of 
Methodist, Baptist, Independent, Bomanist, and Esta- 
blishmentarian parents. After rambling about the streets 
in raggedness till they reach the ninth year of their age, 
they are sent to the National school one-half the day to 
commence their alphabet—a task than which nothing 
can be more irksome to their untamed spirits. Bear 
in mind too that in a school of this kind there is a 
perpetual change; the average period of a scholar’s 
stay is very short: this naturally arises out of the 
changing circumstances of the parents, out of the 
facilities with which they move from their houses 
and districts, and from the caprices to which they 
are not less subject than their betters. Consider, 
further, that out of this mass of 120 children not 
one in five returns from school to a well-regulated 
home; nay, a very large proportion witness nothing 
in their families but positive wickedness and loath¬ 
some filth. Profane oaths are household words to 
them, and reeling drunkenness a familiar spectacle. 
Who will deny the accuracy of this statement ? 

Enter with us a National school in such a locality. 
You have pored over the eloquent pages of educational 
pamphlets you have listened to lofty speeches on this 
subject*at Exeter Hall; you have been almost blinded 
by ‘ the excess of light,’ as some House-of-Commons 


46 OUR MANUFACTURING P0PULA1I0NS 


philanthropist has emitted his flashes of eloquence on 
this topic. Come in here with us. Behold 120 young 
urchins, ragged as Lazarus, but not so right-minded; 
1 poor as Job, but not so patientuncombed as a hay¬ 
rick, but not so fragrant; untamed as wild asses’ colts, 
1 Tartars of the Ukraine breed,’— 

Wild as the wild deer and untaught, 

With spur or bridle undefiled ; 

’Tis but a day they have been caught! 

The dress of that sturdy fellow at the bottom of the 
class bears striking evidence of a street-scuffle some 
fortnight ago :—• 

Look, in this place ran Cassius’ dagger through! 

See, what a rent the envious Casca made! 

Through this the well-beloved Brutus stabbed. 

Your indignation, we perceive, is rising; you are 
meditating a crusade against unkempt heads, foul linen, 
and ragged jackets ; your fingers are itching to manipu¬ 
late with a small-tooth comb on that squinting tyke with 
the rough head, or to set a patch on that lad’s breeches 
behind, or to darn the stockings of that youngster with 
the short trousers. We love your kindly feelings, and 
would almost venture to assist you; but we know very 
well that your patching, and darning, and combing, 
would be vain as the labours of Sisyphus. The aper¬ 
tures in the posterior parts of those nether integuments, 
we assure you, are as unmendable as the sieve-bottomed 
buckets of the Danaides. 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 47 


1 Come up here, sir. Do you not see that your 
trousers are out at the knees, and that your brace-but¬ 
ton is off ? ’ 

‘Yoy.’ 

1 Why does not your mother mend them ? ’ 

1 Hasn’t no time—works i’ th’ factory.’ 

‘ Have you another coat and trousers besides these ? ’ 
‘ Noa.’ 

‘ Another shirt ? ’ 

‘ Ay, but it’s welly done ! ’ 

1 You may go.’ 

Now, follow that lad to its home ; put on your most 
seductive manner; use your utmost powers of persuasion 
with the mother; exhort her by the love she bears you 
to put a patch on her son’s breeches; and she will 
probably tell you to ‘ mind your own business.’ Sally 
has ‘ a soul above buttons.’ 

Suppose, now, you could place in this school the very 
best master that ever came from the very best training 
establishment; what extent of good could he accomplish? 
He is surrounded by 120 boys, of whom a large majority 
are untutored to virtue at home, and a considerable pro¬ 
portion instructed in positive vice. He is obliged to 
use the monitorial system, and his most trustworthy 
assistant is a boy perhaps under thirteen years of age. 
He has a fluctuating mass under his charge,—a living 
stream is flowing through his school without any pause ; 
and no sooner has a boy become useful to him than he is 
removed. What amount of education can he here impart? 
If you measure the effects by the standard of pam- 


48 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


phleteers and orators, we must answer that they are very 
small; if you measure them by the rules of common 
sense and plain reason, they are not inconsiderable. 
The spirit which has never known what it is to obey 
may be brought into subjection ; the broad principles 
of morality may be inculcated, dimly it may be, on 
those who have never been taught to discriminate between 
virtue and vice ; the elements of secular knowledge— 
reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, grammar—may 
be imparted to some of the better boys, thus laying the 
foundation of much future benefit; some acquaintance 
with our catechisms and creeds may be instilled into the 
minds of those who have never heard of the name of 
their Redeemer. All this is a very considerable amount 
of benefit, if you consider on the one hand the evil re¬ 
moved, and on the other the good infused; but if you 
weigh the results in the balance of your true education- 
monger, they will instantly kick the beam. The in¬ 
struction is limited exclusively to the mechanical exer¬ 
cise of the mind, and the inculcation of a general sense 
of right and wrong ; but assuredly there is no training 
of the heart in religious truths—no infusion of spiritual 
obedience on Christian principles and motives. 

It may not be inappropriate here to examine how far 
such a perfect Christian education can be the result of 
school-teaching solely, under circumstances however 
favourable. We suspect that a fallacy exists on this 
point, which most writers and speakers on the ques¬ 
tion are willing to take up as a subject of declamation 
rather than of practical investigation. The Rev. H. P. 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 49 


Hamilton,* in his able pamphlet on ‘ Popular Education,’ 
draws the following picture of what may be attained by 
sound religious training. He is a fair exponent of the 
expectations of many sanguine men :— 

Religious instruction (he says) is not religion. There is a 
wide difference between teaching the doctrines and truths of 
Christianity, and training to the duties founded upon them. 
As is well remarked by Locke,—‘The Christian religion we 
profess is not a notional science to furnish speculation to the 
braiu nor discourse to the tongue, but a rule of righteousness to 
influence our lives.’ We grievously err in fancying that we 
make our little scholars good Christians by merely tasking their 
memory, or exercising their intellect. It should always be kept 
in mind by the instructors of the young, that religion deals with 
the heart rather than with the head; that it begins with the 
feelings, and not with the reason. Let religious instruction be 
carried to the utmost extent that is compatible with the tender 
age of children; let them be thoroughly grounded in the doc¬ 
trines and precepts of Christianity; let them be taught to repeat 
the Catechism (where used), not only with accuracy, but with 
intelligence; let the Bible be read by them in a reverential 
spirit, and not degraded into a task-book; let them be well versed 
in the leading facts of Scripture history. All this is essential. 
But to stop here, to be satisfied with this, is to fall immeasurably 
short of the great end of a Christian education. To religious 
instruction, properly so called, we must add the moral and 
religious training of the heart. By which we mean, the infusing 
of devotional feeling, the implanting of Christian principles, the 
forming of religious habits, and the impressing by example, as 
well as precept, the several duties we owe to God, our neighbour, 
and ourselves.—P, 27. 

Now, let ns assume the very best machinery and 
most favourable material for education that mind can 

* [The present Dean of Salisbury.—1866.] 

E 


VOL. I. 


50 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


devise; let us take 100 boys, from seven to thirteen 
years of age, and place them under three of the cleverest 
masters that can be selected; let us suppose the scene 
to be Eton, Harrow, or Rugby; or let us take the case 
of Proprietary schools, from which boys return home 
every evening to parents of the better classes, who, we 
take for granted, have generally speaking a proper idea 
of parental responsibility. In this, the most favourable 
assumption, how much heart-religion would be imparted 
within the four walls of the school? We are not now 
addressing an audience from the platform,—we speak to 
those who are candid enquirers after truth, and have 
therefore no hesitation in expressing our belief, that in 
schools even of this order the stamp of religion —of 
Christian motives on the heart and Christian demeanour 
on the habits—is but lightly impressed on the pupil’s 
nature, so far as the master, and only the master, ap¬ 
plies it. Very much may be done, without any ques¬ 
tion : the child may be taught obedience and order, and 
in these qualities become 1 father of the man ; ’ the dor¬ 
mant powers of the mind may be awakened, and the 
torpid faculties of the soul may be summoned from their 
secret places ; the warm and buoyant feelings of youth, 
bursting forth like the joyous mountain-spring, may 
be directed into the channels of truthfulness, integrity, 
kindliness, generosity, and honour. But religion, in its 
truest sense, has not its birth in the school-room; it 
cannot be taught in classes ; it is individual in its every 
characteristic ; it is found alone, but not alone, in soli¬ 
tary musings and knee-bending prayer; it is born on 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 51 


the domestic hearth, and can only be instilled fresh and 
pure from the full gushings of a mother’s heart. 

In educating the young, we should consider the 
materials on which we have to work; we should re¬ 
member that we have the elastic feelings of boyhood to 
direct and control; we should beware of throwing the 
mere mask of religious profession over the ingenuous 
affections of the youthful heart; for where are cant and 
hypocrisy so loathsome as in children? This, however, 
is a very possible supposition. About a year ago we 
visited with a friend a very well managed Commercial 
school, where both the secular and religious departments 
of education were conducted with great care. A boy 
had just misbehaved, and been punished for his fault. 

1 What ought we to do for this boy ? ’ asked the mas¬ 
ter, in our presence. 

1 Pray for him,’ was the universal response of the class. 

1 A noble answer! ’ was the exclamation of our friend. 

It was however a mere answer of rote; for not long 
after we happened to see one of that class, in schoolboy 
phrase, * pitching into’ another very ruthlessly, as if he 
would much rather take the law into his own hands than 
commit it to a higher Power. For our own part, we 
must plead guilty to the old-fashioned weakness of 
loving to see lads engaged in their pleasant pastimes 
at the proper season; we delight to hear the 1 old 
familiar ’ expressions of ‘ knuckle down and no brush ; ’ 
and we verily believe that we should shut our eyes if 
we had a presentiment that an erratic snowball— 

‘ moon-freezing’—clean and pure as crystal—winged 


52 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


by the agile arm of some frolicsome younker, was about 
to salute the ear even of a royal servant in the person 
of a twopenny postman, as he was rattling past in his 
red coat and on his bob-tailed pony. 

For what purpose are we reasoning thus ? Is it to 
prove that our National schools are at present in a 
satisfactory condition? Very far from it. We have 
shown the contrary. Is it to show that no benefit can 
be effected from improved systems ? Assuredly not. 
Is it to remove scriptural instruction, as such, from 
our schools ? God forbid. We wish however to 
place the question on its true footing—to remove the 
fallacy, on the one hand, that the country can be evan¬ 
gelized from Day schools alone; and on the other, 
to examine some suggestions which have been pro¬ 
pounded for the improvement of this particular engine 
of national elevation. We believe that the present 
machinery is effecting no inconsiderable degree of good. 
Every process of thought in the study of any secular 
subject, in however narrow a circle the youthful mind 
may work, reacts in a greater or less degree on the 
moral constitution. It puts in motion the wheels of 
reflection, reasoning, judgment—the great desiderata 
of human life—and is a means of reducing the un¬ 
organised mind to something like system. Every step 
of advancement in reading, writing, or arithmetic, is 
an ascent on the intellectual ladder, and humanizes 
the whole being. Every act of enforced submission 
tends to subjugate the wild passions of the boy. Every 
creed, or catechism, or collect committed to memory, 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. -53 


is of present, and will be of still more future service* 
when the intellectual faculties have become further 
developed. Let no one turn up his nose at the idea 
of committing to memory ! Many in their zeal seem 
to forget that the rudiments of every department of 
study, from the lowest to the highest, must be commit¬ 
ted to memory on trust, before any progress can be 
made in it; and that much must be taken for granted 
till such time as the more enlarged powers can reason 
and generalize on the subject for themselves. 

We may now be permitted to offer a few remarks on 
the means which may be taken for the improvement 
of our National schools. This has been the great 
problem of late years. The subject has been so far 
cleared of its ancient incrustations, that the propriety 
of educating the poor is all but universally admitted. 
The days of Jack Cadeism are gone by, when school¬ 
masters were 1 hung with their pen and inkhorn about 
their necks.’ The rude era of chivalry is passed away, 
when men rejoiced in the sentiment of old Douglas:— 

Thanks to Saint Botham, son of mine, 

Save Gawain, ne’er could pen a line. 

Plate armour has given way to copper-plate; Captain 
Sword has been routed by Captain Pen. If there be 
any doubt on the propriety of education, it is not in 
regard to the poor, but the rich. ‘ Tony Lumpkin has 
a good fortune,’ argues Mrs. Hardcastle. 1 My son is 
not to live by his learning. I don’t think a boy wants 
much learning to spend fifteen hundred a-year.’ And 


54 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


we ourselves heard a similar process of reasoning not 
long ago. ‘ Edy cation ! ’ exclaimed an old woman, as 
we were regretting that a certain young man had not 
been brought up more suitably to his station—‘ Edy ca¬ 
tion ! what’s the use of edy cation ? John has getten 
three ’states! ’ 

The great wants at present existing in our schools are, 
—a better and cheaper class of school-books, a better 
trained order of masters, and their number increased 
threefold. Large demands, we admit, and unattainable, 
we believe, all at once ! But how approximate nearest to 
these ends, with the least that is obnoxious in the employ¬ 
ment of means ? Three modes of proceeding are open to 
our choice: we may either leave the education of the poor 
entirely dependent on voluntary exertions; or we may 
adopt some Government plan of general and promiscuous 
instruction; or we may engraft on our existing systems 
certain aids and adjuncts from Government, without any 
material interference with the present management of 
onr schools. 

Upon the effect of unaided voluntary exertions there 
can hardly be two opinions seriously entertained. The 
‘ cheerful givers ’ are already sufficiently taxed; even 
now they shrug up their shoulders at the term ‘ vo¬ 
luntary ; ’ they feel like the Cambridge man who is 
compelled to pass through the gate of his ‘Voluntary’ 
on the way to his Bishop. Deny this, Mr. Baines and 
his small party may : the working clergy will not. 
They know—and if they, how much more the ministers 
of Dissenting communions!—how difficult it is already, 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 55 


tinder favourable circumstances, to obtain contributions 
for positive wants. After a clergyman has begged 
enough for his Infant schools, Night schools, Sunday 
schools, Clothing club, Sick society, and Church ex¬ 
penses, he will find doubtless that he has exhausted 
the superfluity of his people’s patience and purse. Won¬ 
derful, we admit, has been the result of voluntary effort; 
but if we expect to do more than we are now doing by 
this agency—more than barely to maintain our present 
position in the midst of a growing population, and 
surrounded by growing wants—we may be amiable 
men, endowed with that charity which 1 hopeth all 
things,’ but, we fear, unendowed with that judgment 
which trieth all things. 

Again, if any comprehensive scheme of education 
were to be imposed upon the country by the Govern¬ 
ment, what prospect is there of its being effectual ? 
Notwithstanding the high authority of Dr. Hook* and 
others his disciples, we might safely appeal to any prac¬ 
tically-minded working clergyman whether it would not 
fail in accomplishing its end. The Romanists are a very 
numerous body in the manufacturing towns. Would 
they join in carrying.out the plan? Would they asso¬ 
ciate with Churchmen, Wesleyans, Independents, Pres¬ 
byterians, Unitarians, Baptists,—not to mention the 
infinite subdivisions of these sects—in the education 
of their children? Let the Pope’s denunciation—or, if 
you .like it better, disapproval—of the Irish colleges 

* See his recently published ‘ Letter to the Lord Bishop of St. 
David’s.’ 


58 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


answer. In the working of such a comprehensive scheme, 
simplicity and uniformity are indispensable require¬ 
ments ; every loophole ought to be stopped which 
could give an opening for the ‘letting out’ of the 
waters of strife. But what can be discovered in 
this notable project but the elements of confusion, 
the seeds of dissension, and the needless unsettling 
of the principles of all religious faith ? The time 
may come—not, we fear, in Dr. Hook’s day, nor in 
ours, though we are younger than the Doctor—when 
the country may witness the gentle fusion of our 
present incohesive elements of faith; but that period, 
is not yet: the millennial age is seemingly far distant 
when ‘the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the 
leopard shall lie down with the kid; when the sucking 
child shall play on the hole of the asp, and the weaned v 
child shall put his hand on the cockatrice’ den.’* 

Manchester, not long ago, gave birth to ‘ a Plan for 
the Establishment of a general system of Secular Educa¬ 
tion in the county of Lancaster.’ We know not whether 
ihe maternal throes of the episcopal city have eventuated 
in a living offspring; whether the bantling was still- 

* The Rev. Richard Burgess, in his last pamphlet on Educa¬ 
tion, computes ‘ that five-sixths of the children of the poor now in 
public elementary Day schools are what may be termed Church 
of England scholars.’ Would it then be a trifling matter to 
break up our educational machinery, elaborated at so much 
labour and cost? Dissenters apparently have no objection to 
send their children to our National schools now: Romanists 
would never amalgamate with Protestants under any circum¬ 
stances. 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 57 


born, or yet survives alive and kicking: certainly on its 
embryo developments it bore the mark of a rickety 
abortion. It was to be a large and comprehensive 
measure: the money required was to be levied by 
a rate. ‘ A county Board of Education shall be 
established,’ says the prospectus, ‘consisting of twelve 
persons, of whom not more than three shall be members 
of any one religious denomination : ’ this county Board 
had to appoint another, on which would devolve the 
duty of selecting the school books—‘ a commission,’ 
the rules stipulate—‘ consisting of nine individuals, no 
two of whom shall be members of the same religious de¬ 
nomination ; and in order that the peculiar tenets of no 
religious sect may be favoured , the unanimous concurrence 
of the commission shall be required in the selection ! ’ 
(To render the scheme perfect, the promoters had only 
to appoint some vigorous Van Amburgh as the chair¬ 
man of one committee; some Carter, the lion-tamer, as 
the chairman of the other; and as general secretary, our 
old friend of peace-making celebrity, the proprietor of 
‘ the Happy Family.’ 

It remains therefore that the only feasible plan for 
the improvement of education among the poor is to en¬ 
graft fresh shoots into the present system. We quite 
agree in the observations of Mr. Hamilton :— 

Since it appears (are his words) that neither the exclusive 
Church system nor the exclusive State system is practicable, 


* [The writer was not at that time a resident in Manchester.— 
1866.] 



58 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


and that the exclusive Voluntary system is incompetent to 
meet the wants of the country, there is but one available alter¬ 
native—that the people should be assisted by the Government in 
the task of educating themselves. In other words, we must have 
such a combination of the Voluntary and State systems, as shall 
vest the general superintendence of popular education in the State, 
but shall leave it to be exercised in conjunction and cooperation 
with the people.—P. 8. 

The Government has, without question, acted with 
the best judgment in their late Minutes of the Committee 
of Council on Education. The measure is but a 
small one, indeed : it will hardly be felt in many districts 
more sensibly than would a hornet’s sting on the hide of 
a rhinoceros; but it is in the right direction, and must 
lead onward to the best practical results.* 

The propriety of Government inspection no one now 
doubts. Indeed, writers on education of the present 
day exalt the office and the officials perhaps more highly 
than they deserve. Should these humble observations 
fall under the notice of any member of the Government, 

* "We would venture to point out a defect in the late Minutes 
of the Committee of Council : we do not venture to suggest a 
remedy. In those National schools which are situated in the 
poorest manufacturing districts there is the least chance of 
educating pupil teachers. The factory being open to the young 
for full time at the age of thirteen, we are bold enough to predict 
that very few parents, if any, will forego the immediate benefit 
from their children’s employment there for the uncertain prospect 
of their becoming pupil-teachers some years afterwards. Thus 
the districts that most require aid will least obtain it. The 
application which is effectual when the malady lies near the 
surface, may prove altogether powerless when the disease is deep- 
rooted and difficult to reach. • 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 59 


or any Board in which is vested the appointment of school 
inspectors, let us hazard a whisper of counsel. Be very 
careful about the qualifications of those whom you select. 
All are of course intellectually competent to examine 
National schools; but it by no means follows that, in 
judgment, temper, and discretion, they possess any fitness 
whatever for the office. The inspector is virtually 
irresponsible: to whom can parties who feel aggrieved 
appeal? He has also a delicate duty to perform— 
one of a seemingly arbitrary nature, and therefore 
in some degree repulsive. Exercise it arbitrarily, and 
it becomes positively offensive. Take care then 
that your inspectors be gentlemen—gentlemen, we 
mean, in feeling—men who can comprehend intuitively 
the delicate and sensitive in nature. We write not 
without having seen the reverse of all this. ‘ Did you 
not receive my summons to attend here ?’ was the 
remark of an upstart inspector to a clerical friend of 
ours, infinitely his superior. ‘ Your summons ! ’ was 
the reply. ‘ I do not understand the word.’ The 
school—it might have been deservedly, we admit—was 
described in the Eeport in terms very offensive. We 
were once amused on hearing one of the youngest 
classes in a National school under official examination:— 
‘And the Lord s-a i-d said u-n-t-o unto A-b-r-a-h-a-m, 
Abraham ; ’ and so on the ragged little urchins fought 
through the lesson. ‘ Close the book,’ said Her Majesty’s 
servant, majestically. ‘ Come now,’ he continued, 
placing his hands behind his coat-skirts a la Pickwick, 
rising on his toes, and sinking on his heels with a crack— 


60 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


i come now, tell me, what have you been reading about?’ 
A question which reminded us of our Oxford ‘Collec¬ 
tions,’ when a good-natured old Fellow used invariably 
to ask—‘ Come now, tell me all you know about Greece.’ 
Our acquaintance with these School-inspectors is not 
very extensive; nor would we for a moment be sup¬ 
posed to look unfavourably upon all: but assuredly we 
shall at all times exercise our privilege of expressing 
ourselves freely on what we have seen. We have wit¬ 
nessed personally instances of anything but judicious 
demeanour on the part of more than one ; we have ob¬ 
served in the official Reports remarks unquestionably 
drawn up at a venture; and we perceive that these 
gentlemen in their elaborate disquisitions refer every 
school, from the one filled with ‘ short-timers,’ such as 
we have described, to the Commercial school which is 
attended by the sons of respectable tradesmen, to one 
unbending standard, without any reference to the ma¬ 
terials which the master has to mould into form. Are 
we wrong then in suggesting as a subject of reflection 
both to the Government and the clergy, that the in¬ 
spectors be inspected as well as our schools ?* 

* [This article was written in the year 1848, when the 
question of National Education was just emerging from the depths 
of indifference, and beginning to be a subject of Governmental 
attention. On the re-perusal of it, we do not find that it con¬ 
tains sentiments that we would recall. 

At that period many complaints appeared in the newspapers 
of the arbitrary conduct of some among the School Inspectors, 
and, as we think, not without justice. We trust that time has 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 61 


We have sometimes thought of making a present of 
the following anecdote to a School-inspector, if we could 
have met with one in his merry mood. It would have 
been good stock in trade. A friend of ours undertook 
to examine a class in a school, certainly not well con¬ 
ducted, in which he had some interest. The subject- 
matter was the broken Catechism ; the particular topic, 
the Creed. 

4 By whom was He conceived ? ’ our friend asked 
from the book. 

‘ He was conceived by the Holy Ghost/ was the ready 
answer. 

4 Of whom was He born ? ’ was the question to the 
next boy. 

‘ He was born of the Virgin Mary,’ responded the 
youth, boldly. 

* Under whom did He suffer ? ’ was the question ad¬ 
dressed to the third in order. 

4 He was crucified, dead, and buried,’ said the boy, 
in a whining, hesitating tone, as if conscious that all 
was not right. 

4 No, no ! Under whom did He suffer ? By whom 
was He crucified ? ’ 

The lad repeated the same words in the same draw¬ 
ling tone. The question was put a third time, and the 
same answer returned; when one of the class, more 
intelligent than the rest, stepped forward, and, after a 

mellowed the crudities of these green and tart officials, and 
experience taught them a truer sense of their position and duty.— 
1866 .] 


62 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


twitch of his frontal lock and an awkward scrape of the 
foot, said, in a tone half supplicatory, half explanatory,— 
‘ Please, sir, Pontius Pilate has getten th’ ma-sles i ’ 


Infant Schools. 

I 

The National schools of our manufacturing districts, 
we have observed, are for the education of children 
varying generally from six or seven to thirteen years of 
age. But education must begin before six, and con¬ 
tinue after thirteen, if it is to be effectual. Other schools 
therefore are required, that the mellow ground of the 
infant heart may be prepared for the seed, and that the 
blade as it springs up may not wither and die from 
want of cultivation and care. 

The Infant school is intended to be a feeder for the 
National. In a populous district the one ought never to 
be found without the other. The establishment of In¬ 
fant schools has been opposed and scouted by many, and 
is so still by some, like almost every other benevolent 
and useful institution at its commencement. But let us 
enter the building before us; and if your heart be not 
softened at the scene inside, we will give you up as 
bilious beyond hope. You see upwards of a hundred 
little toddling things, the eldest of whom is not more 
than seven, for the most part with clean hands, smiling 
faces, and tidy dresses. How happy they look as they 
pass through their various evolutions! An odd one here 
and there may be piping its eye for the loss of some trifle 
which was to it a world; but its tears are dried, and 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 63 


its treasure is forgotten, even while you are observing 
it. Now you shall see them march. Hands behind! 
forward ! Look at that fat lad of three years old : how 
boldly and firmly he plants his feet; his heart is as large 
as that of an infant Napoleon. See that red-faced, clean¬ 
looking child : she might never have known what it is 
to be dirty; and yet her parents are neither clean in 
their persons nor orderly in their conduct. That sweet, 
interesting girl there of six, is an orphan—an orphan 
virtually, for her father was killed in a drunken brawl, 
and her mother has since been transported. Poor child ! 
she probably knows nothing of her parentage ; she looks 
as happy as if she were arrayed in lace and satin. God 
grant that her pretty face may never become her ruin ! 
But listen : they are going to sing a hymn,— 

There is beyond the sky 
A heaven of joy and love ; 

And holy children, when they die, 

Go to that world above. 

We know not how far the chorus of a hundred infant 
voices is in perfect harmony of sound, but a hundred 
hearts are echoing notes more musical to the ears of the 
All-hearing than the most passionate strains of the Opera 
or Concert Hall. 

But is it possible to convey instruction to infants who 
have only just escaped from their mothers’ arms? With¬ 
out any question it is. From Aristotle to Locke, from 
Locke to Lord Brougham, from Lord Brougham to the 
first intelligent nurse you meet in the streets, it has been 
a maxim, deduced from experience and supported by 


64 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


common sense, that education must commence with the 
earliest dawn of the faculties. Education, remember, 
not so much in the exercise of the mental powers, as in 
the training of the infant feelings to a sense of right and 
wrong. Look upon the matter too, not only in the light 
of the good the children acquire, but of the evil they 
avoid. Take the school we have inspected: where 
would the scholars have been, had they not been thdlre ? 
Rolling about in the street channels, or sunk in filth at 
their homes. On the other hand, within these walls 
they are taught the duties of cleanliness, neatness, order, 
and submission. They are instructed in the rudiments 
of secular learning; they acquire an attachment to their 
school; they are made to comprehend the simplest truths 
of revelation ; they become impressed with a sense of 
obedience and duty; and their minds and feelings re¬ 
ceive a tone of decency and propriety, which in some, 
we trust, will never be effaced through life. 


Sunday Schools. 

But, after thirteen years of age, what means of in¬ 
struction are within the reach of the manufacturing 
poor ? We point to our Sunday schools, not so much as 
promoting the secular department of education as im¬ 
parting scriptural knowledge and implanting religious 
truth. 

Do I say, then (asks Dr. Hook), that there is no religious edu¬ 
cation in our large manufacturing districts, except in the neigh¬ 
bourhood of the wealthy? No, indeed. We may bless God 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 65 


that we not only possess a system of religious training, but that 
we are, year by year, visibly improving upon it. The mainstay 
of religious education is to be found in our Sunday schools. The 
most earnest, the most devoted, the most pious of our several 
congregations, are accustomed with meritorious zeal to dedicate 
themselves to this great work. All classes are blended together; 
rich and poor, one with another, rejoice to undertake the office of 
Sunday-school teachers. Many young men and young women, 
who have no other day in the week for recreation and leisure, 
with a zeal and charity (for which may God Almighty bless them!) 
consecrate their little leisure on the Lord’s day to the training of 
little children in the way they ought to go. Each has a separate 
class, and becomes personally acquainted with the character of 
each member of the class. He visits his children at their homes, 
walks with them, converses with them, and being a person of 
spiritual experience, is able to give that advice which a sou 
aspiring after heavenly things so greatly needs, and which none 
but those who know what spiritual difficulties and spiritual com¬ 
forts are can impart,—while in all peculiar cases he has his pastor 
to whom he can refer his young charge, or from whom he can 
himself receive directions how to proceed. The Sunday-school 
teacher prepares the children to be catechised at church, and 
when the season for confirmation draws near, is able to in¬ 
form the clergyman of the advice which is needful in each par¬ 
ticular case among his pupils, the characters of whom have 
been long before., him. The children act in subordination 
to the teacher, the teacher to the superintendent, the super¬ 
intendent to the clergyman. Young persons, too old to remain 
as pupils, permit themselves sometimes to be formed in classes, 
to be prepared, on the week-day, for the duties they are to 
perform on the Sunday. In the parish in which he who has 
the pleasure of now writing to your lordship resides, there is 
an association of Sunday-school teachers, which numbers six 
hundred members, who meet at stated times to converse on 
subjects connected with their high and sacred calling, and 
to receive instruction from the clergy. Happy meetings they 
VOL. I. F 


66 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


are, and may they be blessed to the spiritual edification of both 
elergy and people ! * 


This may appear to some an ebullition of enthusiasm 
on the part of the worthy doctor ; but we are ourselves 
able, and we rejoice in the opportunity of doing so, 
to give our testimony to its general truth. In the 
present condition of education, Sunday schools are, be¬ 
yond all question, the most successful, if not the only 
real instruments of diffusing a religious tone of feeling 
among the younger members of our flocks. This may 
be a startling assertion to some; but it is so, simply 
from their being unacquainted with the nature of such 
institutions in populous districts. Tell us now, kind 
reader, what is your idea of a Sunday school in a manu- 
turing town ? There is floating before your mind 
doubtless a vision of some hundred young urchins, clad 
in their better breeches and holiday frocks, varying from 
seven to fourteen years of age ; one here sucking a 
squashy orange, another there munching a cake of 
greasy gingerbread. Come with us to the school over 
which we happen to preside. We do not invite you 
from the fact of its exhibiting any superiority over 
others, but solely as being a fair, perhaps a favourable, 
specimen of the class in a purely manufacturing dis¬ 
trict of six thousand souls. We enter the adult female 
school: you see arranged in twelve classes from a hun¬ 
dred and fifty to two hundred women, the youngest 


* ‘ Letter to the Lord Bishop of St. David’s.’ 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 67 


of whom is fourteen,—the oldest might not wish to tell 
her age—say, forty. We have wives and widows amongst 
them; we have a mother and her daughter—the latter 
seventeen—in the same class. Everything is still— 
4 there is no tiddle-taddle or pabble-babble, I warrant 
you ’—teaching is going on audibly, but not loudly ; 
for the great majority are intent' on the subjects before 
them. It is a summer’s day and the sun himself, as well 
as the scholars, seems to have put on his Sunday dress. 
Are you not struck with the neat and elegant—the 
simplex munditiis —appearance of the young people ? 
Their clothes are not expensive; but they are well- 
made, and serve to set off many a handsome figure to 
great advantage. Wither those artificials, though! 
They will now and then burst into bloom this warm 
weather, notwithstanding all our vigilance. Now of these 
young women more than nineteen-twentieths are opera¬ 
tives ; they have toiled from week toweek for twelve hours 
a day in the factory, since they were thirteen ; they have 
necessarily witnessed many a disgusting scene, and heard 
many a foul expression from their youth up ; and yet 
many of them exhibit a gentility of manner, and.a deli¬ 
cacy of feeling, which would lose nothing by being 
alongside the more polished surface, but colder conven¬ 
tionalities, of high life.* Open this door, and we enter 

* The theory of Bishop Butler is well known, that this world, 
from the temptation it holds out, is peculiarly fit to be a state of 
moral discipline (Anal, part i. c. 5). We have on one or two 
occasions seen striking illustrations of its truth. A young 
woman, for example, has been remarkable for her steadiness 
f 2 


68 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


the school for the younger females. Here you see 
nearly two hundred little ones under fourteen, arranged 
into classes, and as neat as their elder sisters. Mighty 
proud some of them seem to be of their Sunday dresses. 
That riband of many colours is as precious to the young 
girl there as the mines of Golconda. Bless her little 
heart! the recording angel will overlook her weakness, 
even if some thoughts of vanity are mingled with the 
prayers she is repeating. 

The two schools for boys contain together from two 
hundred and fifty to three hundred ; the scholars how¬ 
ever do not exhibit the same neatness of dress and de¬ 
corum of manner as those we have just witnessed. 
Not that they are outrageous or unruly; they are for 
the most part pretty well behaved. But the female 
operative is decidedly a more pleasing specimen of the 
species than the male, especially among the young. The 
girls are more docile than their brothers, more willing 
to follow advice, and more grateful for the pains you 
bestow on their instruction. Their earnings too are 
greater, and by this means they can make a better ap- 

and attention to religious duties, so long as she worked in the 
factory, and had evil example constantly before her eyes. She 
has changed her employment, and engaged in duties seemingly 
better adapted to her moral improvement. Such however has 
not been the result. We have not indeed observed any direct 
deviation from moral rectitude in such cases; but we have 
occasionally remarked a gradual declension from the strict 
observance of those religious ordinances and duties in which the 
young female had before engaged with so much regularity and 
satisfaction. 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 69 


pearance in their dress. They remain longer under 
your personal guidance and superintendence, and are 
for the most part more fearful of losing your good 
opinion. The young man of eighteen begins to have 
large notions; he assumes the tobacco-pipe on week 
days, cocks his hat on Sundays, winks at the girls on 
all days, and aspires to the dignity of a flash man. He 
despises the restraints of a Sunday school. If a few of 
the quieter sort continue there till twenty, it is rather 
the exception than the rule. But the young women 
never fancy themselves too old to attend : they are often 
Sunday scholars till they are married. And herein is a 
great source of encouragement and hope. When 
Napoleon asked the question, 1 What can I do for the 
benefit of France ? ’ the answer of a lady, who well un¬ 
derstood human nature, was, ‘ You must give it, sire, a 
generation of mothers.’ And if we can so educate the 
young women, that when they become parents some por¬ 
tion of them may rear up their offspring in the path of 
religious duty, the effect must in time be very consider¬ 
able. The moral influence will thus extend from indi¬ 
vidual to individual, from family to family, from gene¬ 
ration to generation ; it will act on the surface of society 
as the pebble dropped into the smooth water acts upon 
its surface; starting out from a given point, it will 
enlarge its sphere of motion like the concentric ripples, 
and energize in increasing circles to the end of time. 

Do we mean to say that all the young people who 
have attended a Sunday school as a consequence turn 
out well in life ? Very far from it. If we intended to 


70 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


convey any such idea, we should be stating a falsehood, 
and suggesting a fallacy. We know well that many a 
scholar, and many a teacher too, after marrying and set¬ 
tling in life, become very negligent of their religious 
obligations, and very indifferent to public worship. 
But if we succeed with a portion of those under our 
charge, we effect a great amount of good. This is the 
fallacy of most writers on education. They place before 
themselves an unattainable standard, and discourse as 
if it were capable of attainment; no matter what be the 
varieties of position and disposition, they fancy that 
the effect of training must be the same in all. Now this 
would be very well if we could cram religion into the 
heart as easily as we can thrust an orange into a boy’s 
breeches-pocket, but experience proves the impossibility 
of it. The only wise maxim on which we can act, be 
assured, is the scriptural one: ‘ In the morning sow thy 
seed, and in the evening withhold not thy hand: for 
thou knowest not whether shall prosper, either this or 
that; or whether they both shall be alike good.’ 

Against Sunday as well as Infant schools objections 
have been made; nay, have proceeded from quarters 
whence we little expected the assault. Even the 
1 Quarterly Review ’ is among the assailants —a tergo 
certainly. 1 Call you that backing of your friends ? ’ 
We do not wonder indeed at the proud aristocrat, who 
has perhaps been once in a manufacturing district, and 
whose most interesting sight, even then, was the back 
of his coachman as he left it—we do not wonder at him, 
if, in his prodigious experience, he can discover no benefit 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 71 


in the establishment of Sunday schools. We are not 
surprised at the literary critic, as he is working out a 
theory in his warm and well-furnished study, expressing 
a sense of regret that the hard-working operative should 
for a single hour be deprived of his Sunday’s fresh air. 
We are not amazed, even if the country rector, as he 
gazes over his smooth lawn and green fields, and sees 
the peaceful smoke rising above the distant farmhouses 
—we are not amazed, if he fancies that the Week-day 
school is enough for the wants of a people. But if we 
heard such sentiments from a clergyman in a manufac¬ 
turing district, we should set him down, either as one 
who could not exercise his powers of observation, or 
one who wished to make his opinions an apology for his 
indolence. 

The most cogent argument of the objectors is, that 
the system of teaching on the Sunday necessarily 
deprives the young of some portion of their rest on 
that day. 

But there is another objection to schools in which no religion 
is taught in the week (quotes the Quarterly, from an unpublished 
pamphlet of a city curate of twenty years’ standing*),—they 
involve the necessity of Sunday schools. To this eminently popular 
method of profaning the Sabbath I have always entertained the 
most decided aversion. The Sunday-school system—as far as the 
scholars are concerned—turns what ought to be a cheerful re¬ 
ligious festival into a day of gloom and penance; a sad routine 
of lessons and of lecturing, and of rigorous confinement to the 
church and school. 


* 


The Education of the People .—September 1846. 



72 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


God knows, no rational clergyman would willingly 
deprive a young person who has laboured hard through 
the week of one moment’s rest on the Sabbath, if it 
could be avoided: and without question the mental 
exercise required in a Sunday school interferes with 
that peaceful frame of mind which the old woman 
described as ever coming over her in her place of 
worship :— 1 I sits, and I twirls my thumbs, and I 
just thinks about nothing.’ But, after all, to what 
does the grievance amount ? It is simply an attendance 
one hour, morning and afternoon, before the Church 
service commences. And as to the possibility of Na¬ 
tional supplying the place of Sunday schools in a 
manufacturing district, did any reasoning being ever 
entertain a notion so wild? At the age of thirteen, 
when the children are removed from the National 
school, religious education is barely commencing. Left 
at that time to themselves—we go not so far as to say 
with some, that they have received just so much in¬ 
struction as would qualify them for evil, but—we assert 
without hesitation, that they have not received enough 
to stamp on their moral principles any permanent im¬ 
pression of good. But they who have been members 
of the Sunday school before entering the factory, mostly 
continue to attend. There they come more under the 
personal inspection of their teacher, and under the 
system of individual instruction; the subjects on which 
they are engaged are purely scriptural, and the mode of 
conveying information is easy and agreeable. The ca¬ 
techetical method is best adapted to Sunday schools, as 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 73 


being at once the most attractive and beneficial to the 
pupil. To teach by short and concise questions requir¬ 
ing direct and pregnant answers, on subjects of scriptural 
histor} 7 -, or moral duty, or the essential principles of 
doctrine, avoiding all abstruse and disputable points— 
to intersperse sound knowledge with practical, but not 
prosy exhortation,—this ought to be a Sunday-school 
teacher’s aim. By mere reading on the part of a class, 
or by mere exposition on the part of the teacher, there 
is no interchange of ideas. But when a question elicits 
an answer, no matter whether it be right or wrong, a 
reasoning process has been going on in the pupil’s mind; 
and we may be assured that when the young begin to 
think, an opening has been effected to the more secret 
recesses of the heart. 

But, again, the attendance of Sunday scholars, it is 
alleged, is forced. In some cases, undeniably it is. 
But what education is not in some measure compul¬ 
sory ? Leave the young to themselves on the Sunday, 
and there are many to whom it 1 would no Sabbath 
shine,’ except as a day stigmatized by sin and sloth. 
The city curate has a large family—all city curates of 
twenty years’ standing are in this enviable position: 
large families are what logicians term 1 inseparable 
accidents’ to the unpromoted order in the ministry. 
Now, tell us truly, are not Jacob, and Peter, and 
Jonathan, and Joshua, under the influence of force, 
moral or physical, as they wend their way with clean 
pocket-handkerchiefs and neatly-bound prayer-books 
to listen to their father’s exhortations from his own 


74 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


pulpit? But we affirm that a large portion of our 
Sunday-school pupils are subjected to no force what¬ 
ever ; nay, that they look forward throughout the labour 
of the week with sincere pleasure to their attendance 
there, and that nothing grieves them more than to be 
kept away. Force ! why, in the schools we have just 
inspected, two hundred are positively more their own 
masters than the city curate ! 

There is another objection to Sunday schools. Here 
it, ye who associate with the manufacturing poor ! It 
is this,—that the fact of children being sent to the 
Sunday school affords an excuse to their parents for 
staying away from the church! In answer, but little need 
be said. Let us ask this question : How many out of 
six or seven hundred scholars would have been atten¬ 
dants at church, if there had been no Sunday school in 
which to educate them? We answer, Not thirty. How 
many of the parents? We fear to say; but certainly 
the very smallest fraction. On the other hand, visit the 
poor at their dwellings; and we will answer for it, that 
from the general appearance of the house and the de¬ 
meanour of the family, you may form a pretty accurate 
judgment whether the younger members attend the 
Sunday school or not. Nay, instances are familiar 
to most clergymen in manufacturing districts, where 
children have been greatly instrumental in humanizing 
their parents, and bringing them to a place of worship. 

But look to the effects of Sunday-school teaching! 
it is said, in a tone of ironical triumph. 1 We are now 
reaping the harvest we have sown,’ says the city curate; 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 75 


‘ we have an experimental proof of the tendency of this 
system; we are living in the midst of a generation 
whose youth was drilled in Sunday schools; and we 
see what is the practical working of that wearisome 
profanation of the Sabbath in which they were then 
initiated.’ It can hardly be said with truth that the 
parents of our present scholars were drilled in Sunday 
schools, if that be the city curate’s meaning. Many 
manufacturing districts have sprung up within the last 
fifteen years; and many, of a date much more remote, 
have not had churches or Sunday schools till a very 
recent period. We are willing however to join issue 
on the general assertion, 1 We are reaping the harvest 
we have sown.’ We confidently affirm, that if our 
purely manufacturing populations had all been left 
without Sunday schools for the last twenty years, they 
would at this hour have exhibited the most awful 
scenes of unblushing infidelity, and socialism, and wick¬ 
edness, that the gloomiest imagination could conceive; 
they would have been the very playgrounds of the 
devil. Look at their present condition—not such 
indeed as to be the subject of eulogy, but decidedly 
humanized—unhappily we cannot say Christianized— 
in comparison with what they once were and would 
have still been. 

But the scholars misbehave in church ! Do not their 
betters also ? 1 1 feel,’ says Mr. Bellairs, 1 that I echo 

the sentiments of very right-minded persons when I 
say, that, with scarcely an exception, the conduct of 
school children at church is most unsatisfactory and 


76 OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


distressing.’* An untruth, if the terra children is 
intended to include all the Sunday scholars. We 
well know what the young are, and especially boys, 
when collected into a body. Their ideas of propriety 
are frequently not of the clearest. This is a question 
however rather for school-managers: and we would 
always recommend that great care should be exercised 
in the selection of those classes which have to attend 
the Church. But so far from all the members of a 
Sunday school misbehaving at public worship, many 
of them are amongst the most attentive and anxious 
hearers. Many pay for their own sittings and pews 
out of their own earnings, and have more pleasure 
in this payment than in the purchase of the most 
attractive article of dress. 

The difficulties that meet a clergyman in the manage¬ 
ment of a large Sunday school are doubtless very great. 
He has many conflicting agencies to guide, and direct, 
and control: he has human passions to strive against; 
he has hostile feelings to reconcile; he has debts and 
duns to contend with. This however is not the place 
to treat of the mode in which Sunday schools ought to 
be conducted, or the difficulties that accompany the 
effort. Our province is rather to consider the pheno¬ 
mena they exhibit, and the effects they produce; and 
from our own personal experience we can affirm that, 
however arduous may be the task of conducting them, 

* Quoted by the Quarterly, Sept. 1846, from the Report of 
Mr. Bellairs, a Government Inspector of Schools. 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 77 


they afford ample encouragement to zealous exertion in 
this field of Christian labour. We have witnessed many 
a beautiful trait of sympathy and kindness between 
class-fellows in seasons of sickness and distress. We 
have remarked the general good conduct of those 
scholars who have come to riper years. We have 
the testimony of mill-owners and mill-superinten¬ 
dents, that as a general rule they can turn off 
more work, and of a better kind, than the Sabbath 
idlers; that they are the most orderly of all in their 
demeanour, and are the last to join in any acts of 
resistance and turbulence, which sometimes show them¬ 
selves in the best-regulated factories. And in estima¬ 
ting the effects of Sunday teaching, we must not forget 
that where the population is almost entirely manufac¬ 
turing, a very large majority of the teachers themselves 
are operatives: ay, and the very best teachers they 
make. They know the characters of their pupils; 
they work in the same factory, it may be,—perhaps 
in the same room with them; they are acquainted, 
more or less, with their doings at all times; they 
see them occasionally at their homes; and they have 
necessarily a supervision over them which a person 
in the higher walks of life could not possibly exercise. 
And so far is this familiarity from begetting contempt, 
that we have not met with any class of teachers who 
obtain more respect, or can rebuke with more authority, 
if need be. But are they generally competent, from 
their acquirements, to undertake the management of 
an adult class? To procure a well-qualified staff of 


78 


OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


teachers—punctual, intelligent, and zealous—is the 
grand desideratum of a Sunday school. Theoretic 
perfection can never be attained. But we have no 
hesitation in saying, that many of the operative teachers 
are as well-fitted, if not better, for imparting scriptural 
instruction, than even religious persons of a class much 
higher than theirs. They have themselves been pupils 
in the school, probably from childhood, and distin¬ 
guished for their quickness and good conduct. They 
understand therefore the mode of catechising from 
having been long subjected to it: their ordinary style 
of address comes within the comprehension of their 
equals; and they are mostly well versed in a textual 
knowledge of the Bible. It may perhaps serve to 
close our defence of Sunday schools when we say— 
and we say it from personal inquiry and observation— 
that of these operative teachers, who are as accurate in 
their reading as the city curate, and as conversant with 
scriptural truths as you, patient reader, and as moral in 
their conduct as either the one or the other, many have 
never, during the whole course of their lives, attended 
a single day for the purpose of receiving instruction in 
any other than the Sunday school. 


Night Schools. 

On the subject of Night schools we have onlv space 
for a few words. It was one argument in favour of the 
Ten Hours’ Factory Bill, that the leisure gained by the 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 79 


operative might be employed in useful pursuits. The 
argument was the philanthropist’s, the labour is the 
clergyman’s. And yet we do not think he will shrink 
from the duty. We have ourselves tried the Night- 
school system and found it fully remunerative for the 
time occupied by it. Many of the young people, both 
teachers and scholars, who are perfectly able to read, 
and to understand too what they read, have not the 
slightest notion of writing or spelling. It is amusing 
to see the awkwardness of their first efforts; but they 
improve with great rapidity; and in no long time many 
are able, with a plentiful dog’s-earing of the dictionary, 
to convey their thoughts in a letter. Of sewing also, 
and of knitting, and the arts of housewifery, the females 
for the most part know very little. The fingers so 
nimble to direct the loom, are all thumbs when they 
have to direct the needle. And yet the young women 
exhibit great eagerness to acquire these arts; they 
assemble for the purpose as a pleasant recreation after 
their day’s toil. In the schools over which we preside, 
a hundred attend for sewing one evening in the week, 
and as many for writing and arithmetic on another ; on 
a third, about eighty boys come together for instruction 
in secular subjects. It is not many days since we 
witnessed a wild ebullition of triumphant joy—as 
intense as that which burst forth in the Evprjica excla¬ 
mation of the ancient philosopher—in a young female 
who h'ad just knitted her first pair of worsted stockings. 
On the whole, we are assured that Night schools for 
writing, arithmetic, grammar, spelling, sewing, and knit- 


80 OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS: 


ting—established with judgment and system, adapted 
to the particular wants of the locality, and personally 
superintended by the clergyman—will prove valuable 
auxiliaries to the Sunday and Day schools, and be a 
means of converting the benevolent measure of the 
Legislature into a source of intellectual as well as 
physical enjoyment to the poor.* 

In this article it has been our endeavour to take a 
general view of the present state of education as bearing 
upon our operative classes. We are comparatively 
ignorant of Blue-books and House of Commons docu¬ 
ments ; nor do we 4 lament, therefore.’ Having the 
ordinary use of our faculties, and having had some 
opportunities of observation, we rely more on these 
than on the records of flying commissioners. If any 
one however should remark from what has been said, 

* In North Lancashire, with which part of the manufacturing 
districts we are most intimately acquainted, it is beyond all 
question that the leaven of education, concurrently with other 
influences, is working with perceptible effect. Would the reader 
believe that in one year the juvenile criminality of the city 
of Bath, with its stationary population of about 38,300, is 
as large as that of the hundreds of thousands of North 
Lancashire? Yet it is so. From the Report for 1848 of the 
Rev. J. Clay, Chaplain to the Preston House of Correction, 
we find that, according to its population, the juvenile criminality 
of this division, teeming as it is with factories and workshops, is 
considerably lower than that of any English county, Durham and 
Westmoreland excepted. And from an interesting table by the 
same gentleman, which we regret that our limited space prevents 
us from giving, we perceive that in the progress of all classes 
between 1841 and 1847, it surpasses all the English counties. 


THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCY AMONG THEM. 81 


that the present aspect of education is less gloomy than 
he had supposed, let him not be deceived. We have 
described what is —to ov : we have not attempted to 
lay open what is not. The Sunday school we have 
inspected exhibits a pleasing specimen of a manufac¬ 
turing population. But leave the school on a Sabbath 
morning; walk through the populous streets, back 
courts, and noisome alleys of the district; and what 
do you see? Multitudes of people, young and old, 
who have perhaps never entered a school or church 
in their lives, clad in their working dresses, gambling, 
romping, pigeon-flying, rat-catching, swearing. You 
mark the ale-houses and beer-shops vomiting forth 
their streams of living filth, to the disgust of the 
orderly and decent. You are jostled by the drunkard 
tottering home to a starving family, after having spent 
his week’s earnings in a single night’s debauch. The 
portraiture of education as it is, remember, exhibits the 
best features of a population. It is however but the 
bright foreground to a gloomy perspective—the skin¬ 
covering of a deep ulcer — kciWoq koucu>v vtcovXov* 

It requires no great ingenuity to write a pamphlet or 
make a speech on the education of the poor ; it is easy 
to lay down, with line and rule, the process whereby a 
district may be trained up in the path of knowledge and 
duty. It is not difficult to conjure up from the abyss 
of imagination the materials for carrying on the well- 
planned scheme. But, after all, the great question is, 


82 OUR MANUFACTURING POPULATIONS. 


How are we to get the worst order of our population to 
avail themselves of the advantages we offer ? At the 
last election for the county of Lancaster, we heard a 
working man ask Mr. Wilson Patten a few questions 
on the subject of education. 1 But suppose,’ he in¬ 
quired,—‘ suppose you provide the means of instruction, 
and the poor will not send their children to school; 
what then?’ There was a laugh of derision. The 
scorners were the fools : fustian-jacket had propounded 
what is really the great problem. Those by whom 
education is most needed are the most reluctant to take 
advantage of it. You may call them ; but, like Glen- 
dower’s spirits, 1 will they come when you do call them ? ’ 
Many families are sunk in 1 the vasty deep ’ of poverty; 
others grovel in the still ‘ lower deep ’ of sensuality and 
recklessness. How then attract to the school those 
children whose natural repugnance to learning has be¬ 
come strengthened by habits of carelessness and sloth? 
How obtain a hold upon those parents who are hedged 
round by a savage ignorance and a practical infidelity? 


83 


III. 

MANCHESTER. 


‘ Manchester, your Royal Highness! ’ was Brummell’s 
exclamation to the Prince of Wales, when his regiment 
had been ordered there — 1 only think of Manchester ! ’ 
And he rushed away, and sold out. The Beau did 
wisely, and the defenders of our country sustained no 
loss. He who could worship a cravat, as the poor 
Hindoo falls down before his cross-legged idol, could not 
have survived in the atmosphere of devil’s dust, smoky 
furnaces, and sooty chimneys: he who all but fainted 
when Lady Mary was helped to cabbage, would have 
died out bodily by the side of a Manchester dowager of 
fifteen stone. 

It is recorded by the veracious Hollingworth, that 
about the year 520 a giant, called Sir Tarquin, held the 
castle of Manchester, and kept the neighbourhood in 
continual terror, till he was slain by Sir Launcelot de 
Lake, one of King Arthur’s knights. It was currently 
reported that this ferocious monster had a little child 
for his breakfast every morning. Now, so far as we can 
discover, Southerns seem still to have a shrewd sus- 
g 2 



84 


MANCHESTER. 


picion that Sir Tarquin’s appetite survives among us. 
Gentle reader, believe it not. Manchester mill- owners, 
be assured, have not little children dished up at then- 
tables, like so many nicely browned sucking pigs. 
They are veritable men with veritable wives, who 
dine off food befitting Christian people. It rarely 
happens now-a-days that an unfortunate operative is 
accidentally drawn between the cylinders of their ma¬ 
chinery, and at the week’s end put down to the bill. 

It is however a melancholy truth, sanctioned by the 
infallible authority of the ‘ Times ’ newspaper, that we 
are not a polished people. Our breeding to begin with, 
somehow, is of a hybrid character ; and the Manchester 
school, of which so much has been said, is not one in 
which there is an extra charge of twopence for man¬ 
ners. Liverpool is placed invidiously by our side; 
and it cannot be denied that in popular opinion it is our 
superior in the courtesies and amenities of life. Have 
you never heard of the old stage coachman, who gravely 
described his ‘ insides ’ as 1 a Liverpool gentleman, a 
Manchester man, a Bolton chap, and a Wigan fellow r ’— 
giving us, very unconsciously, our several ranks in the 
scale of gentility? Be not precipitate however in 
forming your judgment on our city and its people : 
the Horatian maxim still holds good for every-day use, 
whether applied to Manchester or Manchester goods, to 
ladies’ complexions or gentlemen’s whiskers ,—nimium 
ne crede colori ,—do not trust too implicitly to outside 
appearance and colour. Beneath the Manchester sur¬ 
face there are sterling qualities which peradventure 


MANCHESTER . 


85 


might not pale alongside the somewhat ostentatious glit¬ 
ter of Liverpool, and might not shrink from a comparison 
with the frigid affectation of society in its most subli¬ 
mated type. 

To define a gentleman is almost as impossible as to 
define an abstract idea. Nor is it easy to describe him 
in a few words. The Irishman’s notion is characteristic. 
‘ A raal gintleman is one that never arned a ha’porth 
for himself or any one belonging to him.’ ‘ He’s a gentle¬ 
man,’ said a witness at Thurtell’s trial—‘he keeps a gig.’ 
And not very long ago, a friend of ours heard a graphic 
description of one from a country lad in Westmoreland : 

‘ Do you know the Rev. Mr. Johnson ?’ he inquired 
of a ploughboy he overtook on the road: ‘ he lives 
somewhere hereabouts, does he not ? ’ . 

1 Mr. Johnson ?—ay, ay; I ken him gay weel,’ was 
the answer. ‘ He lodges wi’ our folk.’ 

‘ Well, and what kind of a man is Mr. Johnson ?’ he 
asked further. 

‘ Oh, he’s quite a gentleman, sir—a reg’lar gentlema'm’ 

‘ Now, what makes you say that, my lad ? What do 
you mean by a gentleman ? How is Mr. Johnson one in 
particular ? ’ 

‘ Well,’ replied the boy, scratching his head as if to 
recall the inseparable accidents or the differentia of the 
animal—‘ well, he we-ars a watch, an’ he ligs (lies) by 
his-sel’ !J* 

* He sleeps alone. [This anecdote, slightly varied, is repeated 
by the Rev. Mr. Gaskell in his Lectures on the Lancashire dialect. 
He quotes from Spenser : 

‘ And all the worthies liggen wrapt in lead.’ 


86 


MANCHESTER. 


The lad’s definition, it is true, was not complete : we 
fear many a man wears a watch and sleeps alone, who 
is nothing better than a member of the swell mob ; and 
may there not be many a Brummell who is every whit 
as worthless ? 

If we view Manchester historically , we do not find it 
a mushroom of yesterday. It has occupied a prominent 
place in the annals of our country from the earliest 
period. Our 1 lively and ingenious antiquarian,’ as 
Gibbon styles him, Mr. Whitaker, is adventurous 
enough, in his history of the town, to plunge into the 
abyss of an early century before the Christian era. 
However, not to go back so far, it is quite clear that 
the site of modern Manchester was an important 
Roman station during Agricola’s command in Britain. 
It was called Mancunium, or Mancenion. The word is 
variously derived by our antiquaries; we believe how¬ 
ever that there was an ancient British term, man, or 
maen , a rock, and that it formed the root of the various 
appellations of our town. Manchester therefore sig¬ 
nifies a camp on a rock; and local names, combined 
with the nature of the ground, confirm the suppo- 

So far however as we believe, the word ‘ lig ’ is peculiar to the 
northern counties. In North Lancashire it is not known; but 
in Westmoreland and Yorkshire it is a very familiar one. We 
were once talking with an old woman near Scarborough on the 
subject of early rising, to which she attributed her vigour at 
seventy-five ; we were throwing some doubt on the truth of the 
old proverb, ‘Early to bed, &c.when she asked in a tone of 
indignation—‘ What! think ye, we maun lig i’ bed till th’ sun 
cracks oor brains oot?’— 1866 .] 


MANCHESTER . 


87 


sition.* After the Romans had left the island, the 
fortress of Manchester was strongly garrisoned by 
the Saxons; and it is related by chroniclers that the 

* [It is annoying to find that no sooner does a clever archaeo¬ 
logist build up a plausible prehistoric theory, than some meddling 
Niebuhr or George Cornewall Lewis pushes it down. So with 
these notions of Camden and Whitaker. ‘In the case of Man¬ 
chester,’ writes Mr. Harland, ‘ its original British name, if it ever 
had one, has been lost. In the absence of all proof of “Man- 
cenion ” being an ancient name of the place, we need not further 
speculate on its so-called British name. Its Roman one, though 
it rests on better authority, is by no means clearly ascertained. 
The place is not once named by Caesar or Tacitus, by the anony¬ 
mous Geographer of Ravenna, by Ptolemy the Geographer, or in 
the Peutinger Table. It occurs only in the Itinera of Antoninus 
and in those of the Monk Richard of Cirencester. The best 
authority reduces the name to two forms—Mancunium and 
Mam-ucium. Mam, mam-mog, is in Welsh (vide Luhyd, &c.) 
“ Mother,” and it has the same meaning in Gaelic as in Cam¬ 
brian tongues. In Ireland several high mountains have the prefix 
Mam. In Derbyshire is Mam Tor.’ Mr. Harland then goes on 
to show that the name in the Anglo Saxon Chronicle is Mame- 
ceaster. ‘ Any British or Celtic name for Manchester,’ he con¬ 
tinues, ‘ could only extend to about a.d. 80, when, the Roman 
rule being established here by Agricola, the Roman name would 
be substituted. This might probably endure for three hundred 
and sixty years or more, till supplanted by the Saxon name, 
about the middle of the fifth century; and this name of Mame- 
ceaster or its more Norman form of Mame-castre, appears to have 
retained its hold for more than a thousand years. The last 
mutation, giving Manchester the modern form of name it still 
bears, is of not more than four centuries’ duration. The latter 
part ‘of this compound word, Mam- or Man-chester, will give 
little trouble. It is the Saxon form ( ceaster ) of the Roman 
Castrum, a fortified military station or camp, the c being pro- 


88 


MANCHESTER. 


neighbourhood was the scene of desperate conflicts 
between that body and the knights of King Arthur. 
In the reign of Edwin, the district submitted to the 
Saxon rule; and a lord of that nation, residing in 
Manchester, dispensed justice according to the fashion 
of the day—doing what he pleased, and hanging any one 
who said he did amiss. In the invasion of the Danes 
(870), ‘ Manigceastre,’ says Hollingworth, 1 was almost 
destroyed.’ On the Norman invasion, the Conqueror 
did not forget the town : he made a present of it, -with a 
great part of the country, to William of Poictou. Robert 
de Gralley, the third lord of Manchester after William, 
was one of the mailed asserters of our liberty at Runny- 
mede. As we descend in history, successive barons of the 
place bore themselves bravely at Oressy, in the wars of 
the Roses, and at Bosworth field. The history of Man¬ 
chester is closely associated with the progress of the 
Reformation; and, in the reign of Mary, the town 
was dignified by the Christian heroism of some emi¬ 
nent martyrs, who sprung from it.* In the civil 
wars under Charles it bore its part; at the restora¬ 
tion it joined in the general rejoicing; and it tolled 

nounced ch.’ (Mamecestre: edited by John Harland, F.S.A. 
Printed for the Chetham Society, 1861 , chap, i.) 

We remember hearing the Public Orator at an Oxford Com¬ 
memoration eulogising in the Theatre some one—John Dalton, 
we think—as that eminent man de Manchester ; when a rough 
voice came from the gallery—* What, stupid ! don’t you know the 
Latin for Manchester ? ’ Probably the undergraduate’s Latinity 
might not have been correct according to Mr. Harland. 1866 .] 

* In the library of Chetham College there is a small volume 


MANCHESTER. 


89 


the death-knell to the hopes of the Stuarts in 1745. 
Thenceforward it has been the centre of many well- 
known national movements. Its voice has rarely been 
silent; sometimes it has been heard in mellifluous 
notes, but more frequently in tones rough and loud as 
its own machinery. So that you must give dingy 
Manchester, as you would a certain sooty gentleman, 
its due ; if novi homines ourselves, we are 1 citizens of a 
no mean city.’* 

It is, however, by its commercial enterprise rather 

in ancient type which contains a letter from John Bradford to 
his mother in Manchester, written just before his martyrdom. 

* [We have from the pen of Mr. Harland a sketch of Man¬ 
chester in its every-day dress three centuries ago, drawn from 
Court Leet Records still existing. ‘ Let us try,’ he writes, ‘ to see 
Manchester and its people on a bright summer morning three 
centuries ago, when England was ruled by the youthful Edward 
VI., or his elder sister Mary, or his younger sister Elizabeth. 
It is hard to realise the picture of Manchester under a bright, 
clear sky; the blue vault undimmed by clouds, unobscured by 
the foul smoke-canopy of more modern times,—but such it was 
three hundred years ago. Of the unsightly dunghills, the filthy 
jakes, the deep holes in the cartway, where some burgess had 
been digging fordaub or clay,—of the heaps of refuse of all kinds 
flung out of the houses to decay on the public street,—-it is not 
pleasant to speak; they formed one of the darker shades in the 
picture. Every house of a burgess in trade had its open unglazed 
shop in front, probably to the width of twelve feet to the street; 
behind which was the vacant space of ground, which the Leet 
jury call “the back sides.” Here were accumulated more 
nuisances, in the shape of dung-heaps, cess-pools and swine-cotes, 
the pig-styes of more modern speech. It is eight o’clock in the 
morning, and the inharmonious horn of the' manorial swineherd 


90 


MANCHESTER . 


than its historical associations that Manchester is sig¬ 
nalised. From the earliest period it seems to have 

sounds through the streets. The worthy burgesses, perhaps 
busily engaged in sweeping before their doors, or opening their 
shops, on the approach of this official hasten to liberate their 
swine from their back-side cotes and to bring them to the herd, 
which the horn-blower drives wearily through the streets and 
along Ashley Lane to the common of Collyhurst, where they re¬ 
main till evening, and are then reconducted in the same way to 
their several homes in the town. The ringing of the bell inti¬ 
mated the opening and closing of the markets ; public announce¬ 
ments were made by the catchpoll, the beadles, market-lookers, or 
other officers, from the Cross; the drunk and disorderly were 
consigned to the stocks; rogues to the whipping-post; dishonest 
bakers, &c. to the pillory; scolds were gagged by the iron brank 
or bridle; and disorderly women were carried in the tumbril or 
ducking-stool to the Daub Holes, and there ducked till they were 
reduced to silence or half-drowned. Patrolling the market- 
stands and the streets were all kinds of manorial officers, en¬ 
deavouring to keep order and to put down nuisances. While the 
ale founders, conners, or tasters entered the ale-houses to test by 
tasting the beer and ale, and see that it was “ good liquor,” the 
dog-muzzlers tracked wandering and unmuzzled canines, and 
served their owners with notice to appear and answer at the next 
Court Leet. Ale-house-keepers and bakers were also subject to 
the visitation of the officers for “ the assize of Bread and Ale,” 
while the former were constantly breaking some statute, or man¬ 
orial by-law, by allowing persons to get drunk in their houses, 
by permitting unlawful games there, by selling liquor during 
service time on Sundays, or by taking more per head for wedding- 
dinners or bride-ales than the amount fixed by the steward and 
jury of the leet. In the outskirts of the little town might be 
seen the archery-butts, at which all men between the ages of sixteen 
and sixty were required to practise shooting with bow and arrow. 
Through the town, or in its vicinity, ran several small rivers, 


' MANCHESTER. 


91 


exhibited an aptitude for manufacture. In the reign 
of Edward II., Kuerden says that there was a mill 
there for woollen cloths. Under Edward III., who 
married Philippa of Hainault, Flemish manufacturers 
settled in the town in considerable numbers, bringing 
with them far more skill than the English had pos¬ 
sessed. In a well-known statute, 33 Henry VIII., 
Manchester is described as ‘ well inhabited, distin¬ 
guished for its trade, both in linens and woollens.’ It is 
not supposed however that the manufacture of cotton, 
which now forms so extensive a branch of our commerce, 
was known in England before the close of the sixteenth 
century. Chaucer habits his knight in fustian ; but it 
must have come from abroad.* Nor indeed had the 
cotton manufacture risen from its cradle a hundred years 
ago. The machinery employed on it, if it deserved the 

streams, and brooks, then clear and sparkling, and open to the 
noontide sun ; now covered over by arched tunnels, and so hidden 
and forgotten. Such, then, were the chief external features of 
the little Manchester of three centuries ago.’ (A Volume of 
Court Leet .Records of the Manor of Manchester, compiled and 
edited by John Harland, E.S.A. Printed for the Chetham 
Society, 1864. Introduction.)—1866.] 

* ‘The Manufactures of Lancashire.—Fustians.—These an¬ 
ciently were creditable wearing in England for persons of the 
primest quality, finding the Knight in Chaucer thus habited:— 

Of fustian he wered a gipon, 

All besmotrid with his habergion. 

Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. 

But it seems they were all foreign commodities, as may appear 
by their modern names.’—Dr. Fuller’s Worthies of England. 


92 


MANCHESTER. 


name, was almost as rude as that used by the Hindoo. 
But, about the middle of the last century, the operatives 
themselves began to exercise their inventive faculties on 
its improvement. Men did not as now work together in 
large masses; they were mostly employed at their 
homes. They had therefore more time for study and 
practical observation; they could elaborate improve¬ 
ments step by step at their leisure; they had also strong 
personal incentives to pursue experiments which might 
tend to lighten their manual labour. Thus, a series of 
progressive inventions followed, each advancing a step 
beyond those which had preceded it, till the whole 
manufacturing system has reached its present state of 
perfection. 

Little more than sixty years since (writes Mr. Baines, in 1836,) 
every thread used in the manufacture of cotton, wool, worsted, 
flax, throughout the world, was spun singly by the fingers of the 
spinner with the aid of that classical instrument, the domestic 
spinning-wheel. In 1767, an eight-handed spinster sprung from 
the genius of Hargraves; and the jenny , with still increasing 
powers, made its way into common use, in spite of all opposition. 
Two years afterwards, the more wonderful invention of Wyatt, 
which claims a much earlier origin, but which had disappeared, 
like a river that sinks into a subterraneous channel, and now 
rose again under the fortunate star of Arkwright, claimed yet 
higher admiration, as founded on principles of more extensive 
application. Five years later, the happy thought of combining 
the principles of these two inventions, to produce a third much 
more efficient than either, struck the mind of Crompton, who, by 
a perfectly original contrivance, effected the union. From 
twenty spindles, this machine was brought, by more finished 
mechanism, to admit of a hundred spindles, and thus to exercise 
a Briarean power. Kelly relinquished the toilsome method of 


MANCHESTER. 


93 


turning the machine by hand, and yoked to it the strength of the 
rapid Clyde. Watt, with the subtler and more potent agency of 
steam, moved an iron arm that never slackens or tires, and 
whirled round four hundred spindles in a single machine. 
Finally, to consummate the wonder, Roberts dismisses the spinner, 
and leaves the machine to its own infallible guidance. So that, 
in the year 1833, several thousand spindles may be seen in a 
single room, revolving with inconceivable rapidity, with no hand to 
urge their progress, or to guide their operations—drawing out, 
twisting, and winding up as many thousand threads, with un¬ 
failing precision, indefatigable patience and strength,—a scene 
as magical to the eye which is not familiarised with it, as the 
effects have been marvellous in augmenting the wealth and popu¬ 
lation of the country.* 

What a marvellous retrospect does the last century 
present to us, as illustrating the progress of mechanical 
invention ! The soil had grown its cotton and flax, the 
worm had spun its silk, the sheep had produced its 
wool, since the deluge ; and yet your great-grandmother 
had not improved on the art of Penelope in spinning 
and weaving. Your antique relative might have been 
the housewife described by Virgil— 

Primum 

Cui tolerare colo vitam tenuique Minerva. 

The distaff of Sir Toby is to be found in the lumber- 

* Raines’s History of the Cotton Manufacture. [Crompton 
died in comparative poverty; but his statue now stands in the 
Bolton market-place. It is not long since the death of Roberts, 
whose last years were passed in humble circumstances.. Both 
these inventors were illustrations literally of the Scriptural 
paradox,—‘Poor, yet making many rich.’—1866.] 


94 


MANCHESTER. 


room of many a Lancashire house a century old.* 
Now, millions of spindles are whirling round with¬ 
out the intervention of the hand, each as by an 
instinct gathering its thread around it; millions of 
shuttles are shooting backwards and forwards through 
their warps, impelled by a mechanical contrivance 
as accurate in its aim as that of the best marksman. 
Again, lire and water are coeval with man ; but steam 
slumbered between them, at least for any practical 
purpose, till an inquiring youth not very long ago per¬ 
ceived the germs of its power in its infantine struggles to 
raise the lid of a tea-kettle. A century ago our heavy 
goods were carried on the backs of pack-horses; and 
those noble animals, with their burdens, still adorn many 
a Lancashire sign-board. Goods weighed by pounds 
were conveyed over almost impassable roads at the rate 
of three miles an hour. Now the grunting, snorting 
horse of iron thunders from one corner of our land to 
another, dragging hundreds of tons behind it at the 
rate of thirty miles an hour, seemingly with as much 
ease as a boy drags his go-cart. The changes of the 
last century will not lose by comparison with the wild 
fictions of eastern romance, if we allow art to perform 
in a number of years what the magician CQuld effect in 

* Sir And. Why, would that have mended my hair ? 

Sir To. Past question; for thou seest, it will not curl by 
nature. 

Sir And. But it becomes me well enough ! does’t not? 

Sir To. Excellent; it hangs like flax on a distaff; and I hope 
to see a housewife take thee between her legs, and spin it off. 

Twelfth Night. 


MANCHESTER. 


95 


a moment. And if you are willing to believe that 
most of these inventions have sprung from, or had 
reference to, Manchester, you may perchance be more 
merciful in your strictures on the town, and think 
twice before you turn up your supercilious nose 
at your benefactors. Manchester is somewhat too 
important, believe us, and somewhat too weighty, naso 
suspendere adunco. 

It is not, however, the manufacturing of the raw 
material that constitutes the distinctive business called 
1 the Manchester trade.’ The town, no doubt, contains 
many factories, but comparatively few are now built 
there. The person who intends to invest his capital in 
a mill finds other places more convenient for his pur¬ 
pose. In Manchester the rates are high, the operatives 
are more independent of their employers, water is 
deficient, and the haziness of the atmosphere neces¬ 
sitates the burning of more gas. Our distinctive trade 
consists in purchasing goods from the manufacturer 
and selling them to the retail dealer. The town is a 
mighty reservoir for the cloths of Oldham, Koch- 
dale, Ashton, Stockport, Hyde, Bolton, Blackburn, 
Preston, and all the other manufacturing districts; 
and these it distributes by thousands of rills into every 
nook of our land—nay, to every corner of the habitable 
globe. 

But come, and see for yourself. The day is fine— 
for Manchester; and a short walk may assist your di¬ 
gestion. Look at that dingy building. It is a foundry. 
We would not venture to take you into it: the commo- 


96 


MANCHESTER. 


tion within might derange, would certainly astonish 
your weak nerves. On those premises are wrought 
leviathan steam-engines, gigantic water-wheels, un¬ 
fathomable boilers, and railway bridges warranted to 
last for ever—some for our own country, others for 
Calcutta, others for St. Petersburg, and others for 
Australia. Perhaps the hammer you hear from a dis¬ 
tance is elaborating a machine for ‘ the Diggings.’ Come, 
just peep through this door. See those stalwart work¬ 
men, with bare arms and sooty faces—some swinging 
ponderous hammers, others working the iron with a 
more skilful touch ; while bellows are blowing, and fires 
are blazing, and sparks are flying as unheeded as though 
each man had the hide of a rhinoceros. Virgil drew on 
his imagination as he described Vulcan’s mechanics 
at their daily work, but he did not exceed the reality of 
our day:— 

The shop resounds, the panting bellows blow, 

The flames ascend, the bars of metal glow, 

And the great anvil rings with many a blow. 

Here Tom and Dick and Joe, with sleeves uprolled 
And naked chest, the ponderous iron mould. 

Fire, air, and water, all their powers combine 
To forge an engine for the Midland line— 

More powerful than the bolts the Thunderer hurled, 

In earliest ages, o’er a trembling world.* 

* Modernised Translation. 

Quam subter specus et Cyclopum exesa caminis 
Antra iEtnsea tonant, validique incudibus ictus 
Auditi referunt gemitum, striduntque cavernis 
Stricturse Chalybum, et fornacibus ignis anhelat; 

Ferrum exercebant vasto Cyclopes in antro, 



MANCHESTER. 


97 


But passing on, we come to another building of a 
different appearance and structure. It is eight stories 
high, and seems to stretch the whole length of the 
street. That is what we call a factory. Some fifteen 
hundred operatives are employed in it; strong arms, 
and nimble fingers, and active minds are in constant 
exercise there. But we will not enter. The rattle is 
too loud for refined ears; the smell of oil is unpleasant 
to acute olfactory organs; and the sight of so many 
girls en deshabille might shock your notions of propriety. 

But we emerge into Piccadilly. Look round the In¬ 
firmary Square, and down Portland Street; walk up 
Mosley Street, and into Peter Street; on every side we 
see buildings which rival in architecture the palaces ot 
Venice. These are what we term warehouses, and in 
them is carried on 4 the Manchester trade,’ properly so 
called. See that enormous edifice: it is a large shipping 
house; it is exclusively in the foreign trade. There is 
scarcely on the habitable globe a rock where a cormorant 
has perched, or a jungle which an Indian has penetrated, 
that does not contain goods exported by that firm. 
Probably its 4 ventures’—its 1 floating’capital—amount 
to three or four hundred thousand pounds; and yet, for 
any anxiety we can discover on the faces of the pro¬ 
prietors, they might not amount to as many hundreds. 

t 

Brontesque, Steropesque, et nudus membra Pyracmon. 

His informatum manibus jam parte polita 
'Fulmen erat, toto genitor quae plurima ccelo 
Dejicit in terras, pars imperfecta manebat. 

JEneid. yiii. 418. 

VOL. I. H 


98 


MANCHESTER. 


Those insurance offices are mighty provocatives of appe¬ 
tite, and admirable promoters of sleep. It might seem 
to you as difficult to manage this establishment as to 
manoeuvre an army of a hundred thousand men; but it 
is nothing of the kind. One active fellow presides over 
the China trade, another over that with Calcutta, another 
over that with Western Africa, another over that with the 
South Sea Islands—each with his staff of assistants and 
his separate ledger; so that the enormous machinery is 
turning round day by day almost without noise; while 
probably the head of the house is lounging at] his 
country seat, or legislating for the nation in the House 
of Commons. 

But here is an old-fashioned Manchester warehouse 
in the home trade; and if you please we will walk 
through it. You are in no danger whatever, be 
assured ; only take care lest you be smothered in a bale 
of blankets, or receive on your corns the hob-nailed 
shoes of a porter with three hundred weight on his 
back. What rent, do you suppose, the proprietor pays 
for this building ? It is somewhere between a thousand 
and fifteen hundred a year—a nice little fortune in a 
small compass, is it not? See, there is the packing 
room—the infallible thermometer of the state of trade. 
If this dungeon-like place is still, the whole ware¬ 
house is dull, and the proprietor is in the dumps. But 
now everything is in a bustle; men are working the 
hydraulic press; porters are groaning under heavy 
bales; clerks are perambulating with note-books in their 
hands; waggons, or as they are termed lorries, with 


MANCHESTER. 


99 


large lazy-looking horses and lumpy drivers, are stand¬ 
ing at the door, each in its turn receiving pack after 
pack, till the whole is made up, and rolls away like a 
moving mountain. The goods’ department at the Bank 
Top Station receives it, and it is soon dashing away at the 
rate of five-and-twenty miles an hour to some large 
retail dealer in the south of England. 

You observe that there are half a dozen stories in the 
building : each for the most part contains a distinct 
species of goods. Here are calicoes from the finest 
1 Horrockes, Miller and Co.,’ which would not gall the 
skin of the most delicate lady, to the coarsest ‘ Has- 
lingden,’ which are purchased for the union workhouse. 
See pyramids of linsey-wolseys, to envelop the expan¬ 
sive lower proportions of lusty old wives, and an infinite 
variety of fustians to creak on the dorsal extremities of 
navvies and railway porters. Here we mark a cotton 
velvet fit for a duchess—so delicate that only an expe¬ 
rienced eye can distinguish it from a silk,—and there a 
useful gingham for the factory girl as she plies her daily 
work. What mountains of blankets, hot and heavy as 
Etna ! What masses of counterpanes, ponderous enough 
to have smothered the giants ! What tons of druggets, 
shining in as many colours as the rainbow ! All these 
are waiting, in Manchester phrase, to be ‘ turned over’— 
in other words, to be converted into the current coin of 
the realm or a bill at three months’ date,—to be suc¬ 
ceeded by other bales of similar materials as large as 
themselves. 

But be still a moment. Look at those two persons 
h 2 


100 


MANCHESTER. 


who are engaged in earnest conversation there. They 
are a buyer and a salesman deep in a commercial fencing 
match. The customer has a Quakerish cut about him, 
and his eye steals over the patterns they are inspecting 
with a sort of feline sharpness. The salesman watches 
his movements without appearing to do so, and coquets 
with feints as plausible as those of the most expert 
angler when he casts his fly before the fish’s nose. 
There is no beating down prices—that would be beneath 
the dignity of a first-class house. But many delicate 
manoeuvres are going on. See how the salesman draws 
the fabric between his fingers, to show its strong en¬ 
during quality ! How he tosses it carelessly over to 
give effect to its lights and shades ! Hear him throwing 
in at appropriate intervals that ‘ it makes up beautifully! ’ 
that ‘ large quantities of it have been sold ! ’ that 1 it is 
entirely of a new design ! ’ that ‘ it must take largely 
throughout the country ! ’ The semi-Quaker begs to 
think for himself; he is however inclined to the pur¬ 
chase ; for a moment he seems, by a species of mental 
arithmetic, to be 1 taking stock ’ of his shop at home; 
another glance at the goods, and he has made up his 
mind. The salesman takes out his note-book, and marks 
down the order with an almost imperceptible smile of 
triumph. He has hooked the big trout. 

But come along, we will just take a bird’s-eye view 
of another warehouse. It is of a different character 
from that we have left. It is in the fancy trade; indeed, 
it deals in everything. From this top story you have 
a general glance at what is going on. Some two or 


MANCHESTER. 


101 


three hundred persons are busily employed on the 
premises, and the goods you see before you are insured 
to the amount of a couple of hundred thousand pounds. 
There is scarcely an article which the retail dealer may 
not purchase in this warehouse. Here are your sorts ! 
from a box of pins to a Brussels carpet; from the finest 
lace to the coarsest checks; from the richest satins to 
the roughest dimities; from the choicest shawls to a 
flannel petticoat; from a ribbon to a stay-lace; from 
babies’ caps to wideawakes; from parasols to straw 
bonnets; from whalebone to walking-sticks. Do you 
ask whether they keep lucifer-matches ? Most probably 
they do; that pleasant-looking man there is ready to 
give you any information you require. 

But you inquire about the style of men whose daily 
lives are spent in this buying and selling. Of course 
there is a variety of specimens, but your model Man¬ 
chester man—your type of the class—is a peculiar 
being. He does not know the meaning of the term 
abstraction; he views everything in the concrete. He 
has no idealities; historic associations are unintelligible 
to him. His figures are not imaginative, but arithme¬ 
tical. Even fancy goods he views through the medium 
of the real and tangible. He reduces everything to 
sight and touch. His poetry is not to 

Clothe whate’er the mind admires and loves, 

In language and in numbers, 

but arms and legs in calicoes and fustians. The blood 
of all the Howards is to him but so much crimson fluid, 


102 


MANCHESTER. 


of about the same value as the red ink into which he is 
dipping his pen. ‘ Family ! ’ we once heard an in¬ 
fluential salesman exclaim : 1 fools will be everlastingly 
tracing up their pedigrees to the times of the Conqueror! 
And if they can do it, what better are they ? Will it 
make a pair of bandy legs straight, to have descended 
from a knight in armour ? Give me the man who will 
order up his five hundred pound parcel, and pay for it ! 
That’s the article for my money ! ’ Such an one, like 
Peter Bell, sees things as they are. 

A primrose by the river’s brim 

A yellow primrose is to him, 

And it is nothing more. 

If he examined the coat in which Nelson died at Tra¬ 
falgar, he would wonder whether it were of West of 
England or Bradford manufacture. Of the Duke’s 
despatch-box he would say, that it was worth so 
much as 1 old materials.’ Over the blanket disgorged 
by the boa-constrictor he would soliloquise, that it had 
been damaged fifty per cent. If told of the marvels of 
Aladdin’s lamp he would enquire whether it were gilt 
or bronzed. If he had heard old Dowton describ- 
ing, with all the unction of FalstafF himself, how the 
‘ misbegotten knaves in Kendal green let drive at 
him,’ he would have wondered whether the green 
was fast-coloured dye or not. If he saw the mummy 
of Potiphar’s wife, he would pronounce oracularly that 
the wrapper was flax, not cotton. He is a literal, 
practical, prosaic being. You have heard of the person 


MANCHESTER. 


103 


who was awoke by his wife one fine spring morning 
with the remark, ‘My dear, the day is breaking? 1 
when the unpoetical rogue turned over and made the 
grunting reply, ‘Well, well, let it break—let it break 
—it owes me nothing.’ Here was the matter of fact, 
unimaginative man of trade.* 

But we had almost forgotten that it is Tuesday, and 
as it is now near half-past one we will just walk down 
Market Street to the place ‘ where merchants most do 
congregate,’ and see what is called ‘ high change.’ But 
how are we to make our way down the street ? you ask. 
How are we to permeate this brazen wall—this murus 
aheneus of backs ? The parapet is choked up; men of 
enormous bulk are standing with their arms a-kimbo 
directly in our path, as if the street were their own. 
Where are the police ? What is to become of ladies 
who are unfortunately cast into this crowd ? My dear 
fellow, you are a gallant man ; you subscribe to the 
ancient maxim, that ‘ when a lady is in the case, 
business must give place; ’ but these manufacturers 
from the surrounding districts, who are now discussing 

* [We were not long ago walking in the suburbs of Manchester 
with an acquaintance—not a salesman or tradesman—and we 
passed some cavalry volunteers who were refreshing themselves 
on their horses at the door of a hostelry. We thought we were 
making a very appropriate quotation, as the flagons were up to 
their helmets, when we repeated the line— 

They drank the red wine through the helmet barr’d. 

But oUr friend did not appreciate our cleverness ; he merely re¬ 
plied in a very cool serious way, as though he meant it,—‘ No, I 
think it’s only porter.’—1866.] 


104 


MANCHESTEB. 


the state of trade and making their bargains in the open 
air, regard cotton twist as a more sublime production 
than the most interesting damsel that knight-errant 
ever rescued from a Bluebeard. Capital! mightily 
well you make your way; one more effort and we 
shall cleave through the last barrier of human bodies. 
Io triumphe! we have reached the Exchange at 
last. 

The building will hold some four or five thousand 
people, and without any great architectural pretensions 
it is striking from its spaciousness and general aspect. 
Large however as it is, it is now quite full.* If you 
could perch yourself on the dome-light, the crowds on 
the floor would resemble an ants’ nest in their density 
and motion. Here are several engaged in a quiet con¬ 
versation on the prospecto of next year’s cotton crop; 
here is one moving about near to pillar No. 4, where 
he has arranged to meet a customer; here is another 
threading his way through the press apparently in 
search of some one whom he expects to be on ’Change; 
here is another standing still, quietly waiting for any 
matter of business which may turn up. Look at that 
group of foreigners, consisting of a German, a Greek, 
a Russian, and a Jew; they are making several efforts 
to select the language that best suits them all, and after 
a trial or two they seem to have hit it. The great ma¬ 
jority of those now in the room are country manu- 

* [Since this was written the numbers that frequent the Ex¬ 
change have increased so much that it is now far too small: it 
is soon to be greatly enlarged.—1866.] 


MANCHESTER. 


105 


facturers; and as each of them has several hundred 
operatives in his employment at home, you will not 
probably in so small a compass meet with so many 
little princes anywhere on the face of the globe. What 
is the value, think you, of the contents of the room as 
it is? We mean not the mere flesh and blood materials 
—for to look at they would not fetch much in a market; 
but the property represented by these men. We dare 
not venture on the calculation. There you see a dash¬ 
ing German; he has his house in the neighbourhood, 
large and splendid enough for a duke, and he lives 
very magnificently at the rate of some ten thousand 
a year. Indeed, if we may whisper to you a secret, 
we confess that, walking in the beautiful suburbs of 
Manchester, we are sometimes tempted to break the 
tenth commandment by coveting the splendid mansions 
of these money-making, hairy-faced foreigners. But 
do just look at that man in a rusty black suit and 
dirty white neck-cloth. He is a manufacturer from 
an adjacent district, and worth a plum. He does a 
little preaching also on his own account, in the neigh¬ 
bourhood where he resides; he mixes up texts of 
Scripture with hanks of yarn as he drives his bargains; 
and, after all, people are malicious enough to say that 
the wight who encounters him in trade must be wide 
awake; nay, they declare that occasionally, perhaps 
without his concurrence, his mill hands are worked 
beyond the time allowed by law. That comical an¬ 
tediluvian in long gaiters is a Rochdale millowner, 
and a very decent man after his fashion. He com- 


106 


MANCHESTER. 


menced business fifty years ago with a few dilapidated 
looms, and now he is worth his hundred thousand 
pounds. His mode of living at home is somewhat 
primitive for a person so wealthy. He and his wife 
take their meals in the kitchen, and the latter peels the 
potatoes on washing days. Every evening they have 
their cosy pipes together. The gentleman on your right, 
who is in easy conversation with his neighbour, is one of 
our richest and most respected Manchester merchants. 
If his assistance were asked for the promotion of 
any really useful object he would give his thousand 
pounds as readily as a peer would contribute ten. But 
observe that singular-looking man who is prowling 
about with stealthy pace, and glancing furtively from one 
side to the other like a tamed tiger. You would not 
give six shillings for every rag upon him, and yet he is 
by the Exchange code of morality 1 a good man ’—that 
is, as Shylock interprets it, 1 sufficient’—worth half a 
million of money. Men, my dear fellow, are measured 
here rather by what they have than by what they are. 
Human nature in the days of Horace is human nature 
here on market day— tanti , quantum habeas , es. That 
person came up from the country a boy without a shirt 
to his back; at seventy-five he owns mills, printworks, 
warehouses—indeed, wealth unknown. He has in¬ 
variably maintained a high character on ’Change, but 
we fear his heart has been twisted into a ball of yarn. 
His very appearance is that of a perambulating bale of 
goods—an animated cotton bag. By long habit of 
thought and action he might have been, like the 


MANCHESTER. 


107 


heroes of Ovid, metamorphosed into the articles of 
his barter. Aristophanes represents Xanthias in ‘ The 
Frogs’ as ‘looking mustard-seed’ at his opponents— 
fiXsTcovr opiyavov'* We hear too of persons ‘ looking 
daggers’ in their wrath. Our friend there ‘ looks cotton 
twist.’ 

The merchants and manufacturers who frequent 
our Exchange on a market day, are sometimes 
described as exhibiting a degree of intellectuality in 
their looks beyond anything of the kind to be found 
elsewhere. ‘A phrenologist,’ we read in a work en¬ 
titled ‘ England in the Nineteenth Century,’ ‘willnowhere 
meet such a collection of decidedly clever heads; and 
the physiognomist who declared that he could find traces 
of stupidity in the faces of the wisest philosophers, would 
be at a loss to find any indication of its presence in the 
countenances assembled on the Exchange at Manchester. 
Genius appears to be not less rare than folly: the 
characteristic features of the meeting, collectively and 
individually, are those of talent in high working order.’ 
We must confess that such is not the conclusion to 
which we should come, either from our general ac¬ 
quaintance with the class, or from an inspection of 
those we meet on ’Change. That they are intellectually 
inferior to others, as a rule, we are far from meaning; 
but that they are superior we entirely disbelieve. It is 
not, be assured, from any larger powers of thought, or 
more comprehensive scope of mind, that they advance 
from poverty to wealth. It is rather by attention and 

* L. 602 ; 


108 


MANCHESTER. 


care; by punctuality and precision in detail; by ob¬ 
serving the motto of our old benefactor, Humphry 
Chetham —quod tuum tene ; and by a shrewdness in 
seizing opportunities—a faculty quite consistent with a 
mind that works in a narrow circle. Their business is 
almost as much a routine as that of their bookkeeper. 

We heard from one who was all but a principal 
party in the transaction, an anecdote which illustrates 
our meaning. One of the earlier founders of the cotton 
trade purchased an estate in a neighbouring county 
from a peer, for several hundred thousand pounds. 
The house with its furniture was to remain precisely as 
it stood. When the purchaser took possession, he 
missed a small cabinet from the hall, worth some three 
or four pounds. He applied to the late owner about it. 
‘ Well,’ said the noble lord, 1 1 certainly did order it to 
be removed. It is an old family cabinet, worth more 
from its associations than anything else. I hardly 
thought you would have cared about so trifling a matter 
in so large a purchase.’ 1 My lord,’ was the charac¬ 
teristic answer, ‘if I had not all my life attended to 
trifles, I should not have been able to purchase this 
estate; and, excuse me for saying so, perhaps if your 
lordship had cared more about trifles, you might not 
have had to sell it.’ 

If we view Manchester politically , we shall find that 
it has carried the heat and impulsiveness of its commer¬ 
cial dealings into its theories on affairs of state. The 
very spirit of merchandise is a spirit of progress. The 
higher classes of the town therefore have entertained 


MANCHESTER. 


109 


for the most part liberal sentiments in politics, while 
the opinions or feelings of the lower have generally- 
been influenced by the state of the market. Give an 
operative plenty of work, and plenty of food, and as a 
rule he will not busy himself in tinkering constitu¬ 
tions. But let the factories be closed, and his pockets 
be empty, and his family in destitution,—his tone of 
thought becomes essentially political. Mob orators 
then spring up as rapidly as mushrooms ; they find an 
attentive audience in hungry men; their cry is, Radical 
Reform—a something, a whole something, and nothing 
but the something. They have a panacea for nations 
and for men—a universal cure-all for governments and 
the gout. Thus it ever has been in Manchester. 
Universal suffrage, annual parliaments, and vote by 
ballot, rise in popularity as wages decrease. As if the 
privilege of deceiving by a square box would appease 
a barking stomach! 

Talis latrantem stomachum bene leniet esca ? 

As if universal suffrage would beatify a handloom 
weaver on five shillings a-week ! As if annual parlia¬ 
ments would regenerate a nation, and elevate the moral 
proprieties of a people, when septennial elections manage 
to debauch the better qualities of the heart with suffi¬ 
cient success, and to do the devil’s work on as large a 
scale as he could wish ! 

Your genuine Radical is only to be found in prox¬ 
imity t6 machinery. To the ‘ spinning jenny’ he may 
say, My sister, and to the ‘ mule,’ Thou art my brother. 


110 


MANCHESTER. 


In the south of England he degenerates into a low-lived 
rick-burner, or a sneaking poacher, or a mean-spirited 
compounder of arsenic. The true Radical despises all 
such petty larcenies. He would do a revolution, or 
perpetrate a Moscow conflagration, and be in his element. 
He would spout for any given time on government cor¬ 
ruption and national ruin. But to put away a three- 
years-old brat for its sick-money, or to ring the neck of 
an ignoble pheasant, or to apply a vile lucifer-match to 
a corn-stack!—bah ! he would as soon think of be¬ 
coming a contented member of society, and earning 
his bread by patching antiquated breeches—to which 
trade he has been brought up. View him for a moment 
in his most perfect state—as he is addressing a large 
crowd from a lorry in Stevenson’s Square, or from that 
firj/jia. of promiscuous orators, the Ancoats’ lamp-post. 
Look at his sour, sallow, vinegar visage, consisting 
apparently of several loose bones indifferently wrapped 
in a yellow parchment; listen to his voice, which is a 
singular cross between the grating of a file and a con¬ 
venticle snuffle. He is haranguing on what he calls the 
universal emancipation of nature ; and yet the odds are, 
that he will beat his wife when he gets home. All 
kings he pronounces fools; all governments thieves; 
all parsons rogues; all radicals, himself excepted, 
selfish adventurers: even the man in the moon is no 
better than he should be. Is he not a good specimen 
of discontented humanity ? Was he ever, do you sup¬ 
pose, ‘an infant smiling on his mother’s knee?’ Did 
he ever suck lollipop, and enjoy it? Did he ever kiss 


MANCHESTER. 


Ill 


his little sister at bed-time, after saying his prayers ? 
Did he ever gather cowslips and primroses on a May- 
day morning? Did he ever dress in a round-about 
jacket, and trundle a hoop, or play at marbles, or try his 
hand with a peg-top, or join at prison-bars? Never 
—assuredly never: if his mother swore it, we would 
not believe her. He was always what he is—the real 
Radical, like the poet, nascitur non fit. Depend upon 
it, he entered this breathing world showing his teeth. 

The midwife wondered; and the women cried, 

0, Jesus bless us, he is born with teeth! 

And so he was ; which plainly signified 

That he should snarl, and bite, and play the dog. 

Snarling did he make his debut on the stage of life, 
snarling has he so far gone through his part, and he will 
snarl on to the end of the last act. 

Manchester has been conspicuous for its agitations— 
political, social, and educational; but among them all 
there has been none so bold in its conception and so 
successful in its issue, as that for the abolition of the 
Corn-law. We offer no opinion on the dogmas of the 
Manchester school; we have no personal acquaintance 
with any professors in that popular academy; we do 
not stop to inquire, whether as a body they ‘ cared for 
the poor ’ or 1 carried the bag.’ But it is quite undeni¬ 
able that they accomplished their object by a determina¬ 
tion and perseverance that have been rarely equalled. 
We apprehend however that the success of the 
agitation is to be attributed almost entirely to Mr. 


112 


MANCHESTER. 


* 


Cobden. He was not very prominent at its commence¬ 
ment ; and if he had not taken a decided lead, probably 
the forces, as in many similar movements, would after 
a time have been disunited and broken up. But he 
came to the subject after far deeper study than the rest; 
he directed his attack on one point, and exerted his 
authority in preventing his colleagues from wasting 
their powder by blurting off at every hedge-sparrow 
that rose; he brought with him a practical style of 
argument well suited to the tastes of commercial men ; 
and he exhibited an indomitable energy when his pur¬ 
pose was once formed. Cobden, after all, is a man of 
mark: and now that the force of his sagacity, energy, 
and unadorned eloquence, has hurled Protection into the 
tomb of the Capulets, we trust that trade may prosper, 
the poor may enjoy the blessings of cheapness and 
plenty, the millocrats may exhibit a becoming modera¬ 
tion in their triumph, and that the shadow of their tall 
chimneys may never be less.* 

* [This was written in 1853. Mr. Cobden has been removed 
not long ago amidst universal regret. As a middle-class man, 
none, as Mr. Disraeli said, has been more influential; as a poli¬ 
tician none has been more disinterested. His character can only 
be fairly estimated, when the glitter of excessive praise and the 
shades of undue censure have merged into the mellowed light of 
calm inquiry and dispassionate reflection. The story of his life, 
if written, not in the style of modem biography, but in that 
spirit of philosophic truth which neither disguises failings nor 
extenuates merit, would be an excellent study for the young 
men of our land, whether rising tradesmen or aspiring statesmen. 
—1866.] 


MANCHESTER , 


113 


We sometimes wonder why manufacturers should 
love to become agitators. It may do, once in a while ; 
but we would not recommend it as a practice. We 
verily believe that there is no interest so liable as the 
manufacturing to be shaken by the storms of agitation. 
Over the land the hurricane may sweep for a time; an 
old oak or two may be laid low; a crop of corn here 
and there may be destroyed; a few stacks of hay may 
be carried away; but the soil is still there hard and 
fast: the spring returns; the blade appears; and the 
damaged crops of the former year are compensated by a 
plentiful harvest. Not so however with the manufac¬ 
turing interest. In times of prosperity it is apparently 
stable as the pyramid; but in the day of depression it is 
baseless, flickering, and evanescent as the smoke. A shock 
might come so paralysing that years could not restore 
vitality to the torpid body of commerce. There is, 
we fear, in the breast of nine-tenths of our operatives 
the latent germ of a feeling that by their ill-requited 
toil the employers heap up their Babel of gold almost 
high as heaven, whence they look imperiously on their 
less favoured brethren. The thought may not be ex¬ 
pressed in words ; the impression may perhaps slumber 
unknown. But times of distress and scarcity evoke it; 
the smothered spark is rapidly fanned into a smoke, and 
where is a smoke the fire is not far off. Luckily, the 
operative classes have no one with Cobden’s discretion to 
guide them. Our friend whom we have just left holding 
forth from his rostrum at the Ancoats 1 lamp-post is a skil¬ 
ful manipulator of a grievance, whether social or poli- 


vol. I. 


114 


MANCHESTER. 


tical, but he is an unskilful leader of large masses of men; 
and thus it has ever been, that internal disunion has been 
amain cause of breaking up all the operative confederacies. 
Like the Scythians of old, as we read in Herodotus, 
they cannot long continue in combination. If how¬ 
ever a man with all the qualifications for a popular 
leader were to arise in such an emergency, the con¬ 
sequences might be most disastrous. We have much 
respect for our manufacturers and merchants as a body; 
we admire them as a whole for their liberality and kind¬ 
liness ; but we would not advise them to be too fond of 
agitation, lest their pupils one day* better the instruction.’ 

Manchester is liberal in its political sentiments—of 
that there can be no doubt. It has never yet returned a 
Conservative member to Parliament, though there have 
been many gallant efforts to do so. Its corporation also 
—a body that has the control of momentous interests 
and enormous funds—consists, with but few exceptions, 
of a somewhat promiscuous band of ardent liberals. 
It has rarely had a churchman for its chief magis¬ 
trate. And, after all, there is a strong and wide-spread 
feeling of Conservatism throughout the town. Para¬ 
doxical as it may seem, it is by no means an improbable 
supposition, that if universal suffrage and vote by ballot 
were parts of our Constitution, Manchester might return 
two Conservative members.* 

* [Of late years several mayors have been churchmen, and a 
fair amount of conservative leaven is now working in the Corpo* 
rate body. So far as regards the politics of the working classes, 
we are by no means inclined to retract the opinion expressed 


MANCHESTER. 


115 


But why send for members from a distance ? Have 
you not men of sufficient intelligence in Manchester for 
the discharge of parliamentary duties? Why go to 
Suffolk for one, and to Rochdale for another?*—Roch¬ 
dale where up-and-down-fighting still flourishes!— 
where words articulate are inarticulate to civilised ears ! 
where names of persons are expressed as barbarously as 
in the days of the Druids, or in the islands of the 
South Seas ! Well, sir, while you are taking breath 
we will endeavour to explain the phenomenon. It may 
seem strange, but the real cause, we believe, will be found 
in the jealousies of our merchant princes. Cotton, be 

above. It is the scum of our people that rises to the top of the 
caldron in the shape of noisy disaffection. The manufacturing 
operatives, we believe, might be trained into excellent conserva¬ 
tives. In the late election for Manchester the working people 
exhibited unmistakable scorn and contempt for those who were 
connected with or nominees of what is called the Liberation 
Society. We know that a single fact does not amount to a 
logical induction ; but we may illustrate our meaning by an in¬ 
cident. The liberal candidates for South Lancashire were de¬ 
livering addresses at one of our manufacturing towns: a local 
gentleman had made an effective speech in support of the cause ; 
and afterwards the party was parading in the market-place, and 
marching in procession through an avenue of bodies; when an 
old woman rushed up to the orator who had distinguished him¬ 
self, and giving him a hearty slap on the face, shouted at the top 
of her shrill voice, * Church and State, you beggar!’—1866.] 

* [Messrs. Gibson and Bright then represented Manchester in 
the House of Commons. Of a Manchester election this much 
may be said—that it might properly be a model to every borough 
in the kingdom, for its order, freedom from undue influences, and 
genera] good humour.—1866.] 

i 2 


116 


MANCHESTER. 


assured, as well as hereditary acres, has its dignities. 
We do not wait in Manchester for a lineage to be hal¬ 
lowed by the associations of centuries. We extemporise 
aristocracies. To illustrate our meaning :—On a dis¬ 
solution of Parliament some active men assemble, and 
discuss the question, Whom shall they put forward as 
candidate for the suffrages of the free and independent 
electors ? After due consideration they fix on Mr. 
Chintsey, of the firm of Chintsey and Lighthrown. 
Chintsey is a liberal Conservative, Free-trader, and 
altogether, in Manchester phrase, ‘ a pattern card,’ ‘ first 
rate.’ He has 1 come out '* well on several public occa¬ 
sions, and, without pretending to much book-learning 
beyond that of his ledger, he has a good sound head on 
a pair of broad shoulders. His character has been 
irreproachable through life; he attends his place of 
worship twice every Sunday, and he occupies his pew, 
surrounded by seven or eight young Chintseys of various 
sizes and patterns. Who could be a better representa¬ 
tive ? Well, it gets abroad that Mr. Chintsey is to be 
the future candidate. 

‘ You have heard that Mr. Chintsey is to be our mem¬ 
ber, I suppose?’ says a bustling loquacious gentleman, 
with a red face, to Mr. Puffendorf, of the firm of 1 Puf- 
fendorf and Twist.’ 

‘ Mr. Chintsey ? ’ muses Puffendorf, pulling up his 
cravat, clearing his throat, and looking undeniably 
aristocratic—‘ Chintsey ! who is Mr. Chintsey ? Oh yes, 
I remember—Chintsey and Lightbrown ! Well a—a 
—very decent man, I dare say, is Mr. Chintsey, in his 


MANCHESTER. 


117 


way; but—but—not the man we want, you know. 
Chintsey wants position—greatly wants position. Twenty 
years ago he was u putter-out ” to Cambric and Twills. 
No ! no ! he might do—a—a—for a common councillor, 
or an alderman, or even a mayor, as times go; but he 
will not “ make up ” into a member.’ 

Observe, Puffendorf was in business twenty years 
before Chintsey was heard of; Puffendorf rides in his 
two-horsed carriage, and dines at six o’clock ; Mr. and 
Mrs. Chintsey, and the young Chintseys, dine at one. The 
Misses Puffendorf have been educated at Kensington; 
the Misses Chintsey are at school in the neighbour¬ 
hood. Altogether Puffendorf is a superior article to 
Chintsey—a commodity rated at a higher figure on 
’Change. Chintsey is pooh-poohed as if he were a bale 
of damaged goods; he drops fifty per cent, all at once; 
he becomes a drug in the market; he will not go off at 
any price. Puffendorf in his heart regards Chintsey as 
a presuming upstart; Chintsey regards Puffendorf as an 
inflated bull-frog. The Chintseyites will not vote for 
Puffendorf, neither will the Puffendorfians vote for 
Chintsey; and thus Manchester, as it cannot grow its 
own members, is compelled to import them as it does 
its bales of cotton.* 

But our sketch would be incomplete if we did not 

* [We would desire to modify these remarks in some degree. 
Perhaps local jealousies may have had their influence; but a 
merchant entangled in the meshes of commerce cannot afford to 
give up his time to affairs of state; and when he retires from 
business he is mostly too old for parliamentary duties.—1866.] 


118 


MANCHESTER. 


take a glance at the ecclesiastical , moral , and social 
aspect of Manchester. 

The parish of Manchester was a rectory so early as 
the year 1291. Not long afterwards the advowson 
with the barony came into the possession of the 
family of De la Warre; and by them the foundation 
of our Collegiate Church—now our Cathedral—was 
established. Latterly, the cry of reform has been ringing 
in the ears of the Chapter body. An Act has been ob¬ 
tained for the division of the parish into separate rec¬ 
tories ; and the income of future canons is reduced from 
the present standard of 1000/. a-year to 600/.—about 
100/. less than the salary of an upper servant in a 
Manchester warehouse.* Still, ‘ the old church ’ is 

* [The Manchester Rectory Division Act was the offspring of 
bitterness, and, as might be expected from its parentage, the 
measure is crooked, rickety, and deformed. To take a single 
illustration of our meaning. Each canon is to hold the rectory 
of one of four Government churches, where the labour required 
is gigantic and the duties are most discouraging. Thus, the 
number of clergymen in Manchester is reduced by four. Few 
will be appointed to a canonry under fifty years of age ; and as¬ 
suredly no one at that period of life ought to continue the rector 
of one of those churches, even if he had no other appointment. 
And this may come into full operation some twenty years 
hence. Why not have made each canon at once subject to the 
ordinary law of residence and left him to his duty at the cathe¬ 
dral ? He need never be at a loss for work in a city like Man¬ 
chester. But to bind him hand and foot to a very poor and 
large parish, and a thinly attended church that will hold two 
thousand, seems like strapping Ixion to his wheel. Cannot the 
Act be amended? Cannot the limb be reset? May not 
mutual kindness and forbearance repair the anomalies which 
mutual rancour and uncharitableness have left behind ?—1866.] 


MANCHESTER. 


119 


warmly associated with the domestic feelings of the 
people. There women are churched, babies are chris¬ 
tened, parties are married, not singly or in couples, but 
by hundreds ; and there are but few of our citizens who 
have not visited it on some such interesting occasion.* 

I attended the old church at Manchester one Monday morning, 
in order to witness the solemnisation of several marriages (writes 
Sir George Head). Not less than fifty people were assembled, 
among whom I took my seat quietly without being noticed. 
The people at first took their seats in solemn silence, each one 
inquisitively surveying his neighbour; but as the clergyman and 
clerk were some time in preparation, the men first began to 
whisper one to another, and the women to titter, till by degrees 
they all threw off their reserve, and made audible remarks on the 
new comers. There was little mauvaise honte among the women; 
but. of the men, poor fellows! some were seriously abashed ; while 
among the hymeneal throng there seemed to prevail a sentiment 
that obtains pretty generally among their betters,—namely, the 
inclination to put shy people out of conceit with themselves. 
Thus, at the advance of a sheepish-looking bridegroom, he was 
immediately assailed on all sides with, * Come in, man ; what art 
afraid of? Nobody T hurt thee.’ And then a general laugh 
went round in a suppressed tone, but quite sufficient to confound 
and subdue the new comer. 

Presently a sudden buzz broke out,— ‘The clergyman’s com¬ 
ing,’ and all was perfectly silent. The clerk was an adept in his 
business. In appointing them to their proper places, he addressed 


* [These services are becoming less and less of a wholesale 
character at our cathedral. Still, whoever attends there now at 
certain christening times may have some reason for alarm lest, 
as Mr. J. Stuart Mill expresses it, ‘the labour market may be 
overstocked.’ ‘ They (the lower classes) have no right to over¬ 
stock the labour market.’—J. S. Mill, when catechised at the late 
Westminster election.—1866.] 



120 


MANCHESTER. 


each in an intonation of voice particularly soft and soothing. 
Thus he proceeded: ‘ Daniel and Phoebe: this way, Daniel: take 
off your gloves, Daniel. William and Anne ; no, Anne; here, 
Anne; t’other side, William. John and Mary; here, John; 
oh, John.’ And then addressing them altogether,—‘ Now, all of 
you give your hats to some person to hold.’ Although the 
marriage service appeared to me to be generally addressed to the 
whole party, the clergyman was scrupulously exact in obtaining 
the accurate responses from each individual.*' 

Many whimsical tales—some doubtless apocryphal— 
are related of an eccentric minor canon, or chaplain as he 
was then called, attached to the church some fifty years 
ago. He was on one occasion reading the burial service, 
and had arrived^t the passage, 1 1 heard a voice from 
heaven, saying unto me,’ when his eye fell upon a sweep 
who was watching him from a side wall; his thoughts 
were suddenly diverted into afresh channel, but his voice 
maintained its even tenor as he continued, 1 Knock that 
little black imp off the wall.’ Occasionally, after he 
had despatched the marriage service for some thirty 
couples, a party of young men might be seen rushing 
up to him, some desponding, some indignant, exhibit¬ 
ing a variety of emotions, but all in a predicament 
similar to that of Master Slender and Dr. Caius, who 
were each of them on the point of marrying ‘ a great 
lubberly boy.’ 

‘ Please, sir,’—several voices might be heard at the 
same time — 1 I’ve getten th’ wrong wench !—I’m wed to 
th’ wrong lass ! ’ 

* A Home Tour through the Manufacturing Districts in the 
Summer of 1835. 


MANCHESTER. 


121 


4 Well, well, my lads,’ was the invariable reply, in the 
genuine Manchester vernacular, 1 pair as you go out, 
pair as you go out—reet it a whom—reet it a whom.’* 
The chaplain’s name was Joshua Brooks. Our friend, 
Mr. James Crossley, F.S.A., the President of the Che- 
tham Society, in an article that appeared in Blackwood’s 
Magazine so long ago as 1821, entitled 1 A brief Sketch 
of the Rev. Josiah Streamlet,’ describes amusingly 
some of the foibles of the old gentleman,—who, with all 
his singularities, was a person of considerable scholastic 
attainments. He was very irritable, and had a special 
vocation for interfering in squabbles ; and mischievous 
people frequently played upon his failing. For dissent 
and dissenters he had no toleration. A well-known 
nonconformist minister was in a stall near him as he was 
reading the daily service, when the seat gave way and 
the obnoxious intruder fell upon his back, his legs rising 
higher than his head. The verger rushed forward to 
render aid, but the chaplain interposed with asperity.— 
4 From all blindness of heart, from pride, vain-glory, 
and hypocrisy,’—he was reading,—then in the same key 

* ‘ Right it at home.’ It is not very long since we learnt a 
lesson in the philosophy of love among factory girls, when stand¬ 
ing near the cathedral gates. A wedding party was coming out, 
of a higher class than common, and as usual a crowd was as¬ 
sembled to watch their return to their carriages. £ Ay, but hoo’s 
vast fou! ’ (she’s very plain), said a factory lass to her companion, 
pointing to the bride. ‘Hod thy din, wench,’ was the answer. 
‘ What’s the odds ? There ne’er was a fou face but there was a 
fou fancy! ’ It is the true Platonic theory, that everything is 
double, %v tt pbs cV. 


122 


MANCHESTER. 


came the interpolation, ‘ let the fellow alone, let the fel¬ 
low alone *—‘ from envy, hatred and malice, and all un- 
charitableness.’—Many of our older citizens still re¬ 
member him well and relate their anecdotes of him. 
He rests in the Cathedral by the side of his old house¬ 
keeper, who in life was his ‘guide, philosopher and 
friend.’ 

Manchester, we believe, contains specimens of every 
religious denomination on the face of the earth. This 
may be expected from a people where fluctuation and 
change in every circumstance of life are perpetually 
going on. Many of our great merchants and manufac¬ 
turers are attached to dissenting bodies. 

There seems however now-a-days to be a very gene*- 
ral gravitation of feeling towards the Church; some of 
those who have struggled from the lower ranks to affluence 
do not hesitate to join her communion, while others are 
only withheld from doing so by the magnanimous fear 
of weakening a society in which they have been brought 
up. Their families mostly join the Church, while dis¬ 
sent ever draws fresh blood from the fluctuating popu¬ 
lation. During the last fifteen years the churches in 
the parish of Manchester have about doubled in number. 

The Sunday-school system is carried out among us 
with much efficiency and zeal. Indeed, it is not simply 
a pastime, but a positive necessity, where juvenile labour 
is so abundant as in our manufacturing towns : it mupt 
be regarded, not as a 7r apEpy or, a\\a juaWov firi^et' ekel- 
ru) napEpyov aWo ylyvEvOai* The number of Sunday 

* Thucyd. i. 142. 


MANCHESTER. 


123 


scholars and teachers in the Peel Park on the occasion 
of her Majesty’s visit was 71,684 ; and taking the three 
largest divisions we find that those attached to the 
Church were 25,606; to the Wesleyans, 12,999; and 
to the Independents, 10,461. From these statistics we 
may form a sufficiently accurate estimate of the numer¬ 
ical proportion of our religious bodies generally. Th.e 
Unitarians had only 1,375 scholars; they are rather a 
wealthy than a numerous class in Manchester. 

The day of her Majesty’s late visit is a memorable one 
among us, and perchance not to be forgotten by herself 
and her royal Consort.* Never probably had so large a 
mass of human beings congregated together before. It 
would be impossible to conjecture the number within a 
hundred thousand. Stockport, Ashton, Oldham, Roch¬ 
dale, Bolton, Blackburn, Hyde, Stalybridge—these, and 
far more than these, poured their living streams into the 
boiling caldron of Manchester on that day ; these towns, 
ordinarily so busy, were desolate; the machinery of 
their mills was still; labour was stayed ; the heart of 
those bustling districts had for a time ceased to beat. 
Train after train emptied its human cargo into our vari¬ 
ous stations, and the cry was, ‘ yet they come.’ Though 
there were about one hundred thousand persons altogether 
in the Peel Park, this did not seem to diminish by a sin¬ 
gle unit the myriads that were condensed into one mass 
from Pendleton to Piccadilly. And what was more ex¬ 
traordinary than the mere numbers, the most perfect 
order and harmony prevailed. ‘ Where are your police- 


* [It was in October, 1857.—1866.] 




124 


MANCHESTER. 


men ? ’ asked the Duke of Wellington, as he glanced at 
the masses that thronged the ways -through which the 
cortege passed. The streets in the borough of Manches¬ 
ter were not staked and corded off from the parapets 
and guarded by men in blue; but thousands of strong, 
active men, warehousemen and mechanics in their Sun¬ 
day clothes, formed with joined hands a novel barricade. 
And in the evening, when numbers beyond computation 
were assembled in the streets to witness the illumination, 
amidst all the confusion there was nothing but good 
humour. 

1 Have you had any disturbance yet ? ’ we asked a 
policeman near the Exchange, about eleven o’clock. 

1 No, sir,’ was the characteristic reply—‘ nothing to 
speak of; only one drunk and disorderly, and he’s an 
Irishman.’ 

The scene in the Peel Park was of a very novel and 
impressive character. The enormous assemblage of 
Sunday scholars and teachers was ranged in two long 
divisions, between which the Queen and her suite had to 
drive. The intention was that the whole body should 
join in singing 1 God save the Queen,’ while the car¬ 
riages were passing along. A committee of amiable 
gentlemen had determined to omit the sinewy verse that 
pronounces its malison on ‘ politics ’ and ‘knavish tricks,’ 
and a somewhat treacle-and-water stanza by Swain was 
inserted in its stead. For a month before, Manchester 
was humming ‘ God save the Queen ; ’ factory girls were 
practising it at their work ; butcher boys were shouting 
it along the streets; wherever you turned the song 


MANCHESTER. 


125 


reached your ears; it was an anthem eteme. Well, 
slowly moved her Majesty’s carriage between the lines, 
and the eighty thousand voices got through the first 
verse very satisfactorily, when lo ! as the old Duke came 
up in his open carriage, with bare head and venerable 
aspect, the notes gave way to a cheer, and from a small 
beginning the well-practised anthem grew into one pro¬ 
longed hurrah throughout the whole line. ‘ Duke ! ’ 
whispered a pretty daughter of the Earl of Ellesmere, 
who was in the carriage with him, ‘ that is for you: ’ 
but the old warrior held down his head, and would not 
seem to share the homage that was due, as he thought, 
only to the Queen. 

As a graceful pendant to a royal visit, which was un¬ 
attended almost by a single disappointment,* Manches¬ 
ter has just received the honours and privileges of a city. 
We had the promise of the dignity when the Queen was 

* It is true that some trifling mischances were reported at the 
time. It was said that a certain Salford official, on backing and 
bowing out from Her Majesty, when the address was presented 
in Peel Park, lost his footing and left his well-defined posterior 
imprimatur on the plastic mud, to the Queen’s infinite amuse¬ 
ment. This was proved to be untrue. It was said also that a 
common councillor of Manchester, elated with his new robes 
and the general enthusiasm, rushed up to the Countess of Elles¬ 
mere in the Exchange, seized her hand, shook it heartily, and 
congratulated her on being the genuine mother of her people ; 
and that he was greatly disappointed afterwards on finding that 
she was not the Queen. Upon the truth of this report a warm 
controversy arose; an appeal was made to Lady Ellesmere to 
clear up the doubt; she returned an answer very gracious, but 
somewhat evasive; and the matter remains a mystery to this day. 


126 


MANCHESTER. 


here, but legal difficulties have delayed its fulfilment. 
The title seems to have been coveted by certain mem* 
bers of the Corporation ; but, so far as we can observe, 
the mass of the people, if not indifferent on the subject, 
regard it without enthusiasm. They seem to think the 
rose would smell as sweetly with one name as another. 
To-day we have seen, side by side, the mayor’s procla¬ 
mation declaring Manchester a city till doomsday, and a 
placard announcing that Cardinal Wiseman is purposing 
to lecture on the arts and sciences in our Corn Exchange; 
and the Cardinal seemed the more popular candidate for 
promiscuous inspection. We have not heard that the 
bells of the cathedral rang out a merry peal when the 
charter came down, nor do we imagine that what re¬ 
porters call our i civic hospitalities ’ have been much 
extended since that time. This seems rather a cool way 
of receiving a royal boon. Why does not an alderman 
eat himself into an apoplexy in honour of the event ? 
Perhaps we might be satisfied with a couple of common 
councillors, eloquent from the influence of champagne, 
apostrophising a lamp-post, under the impression that 
it was her Majesty, with the charter in her right hand. 
Seriously though, there is a strange mixture of the ro¬ 
mantic and the real in our idea of the city of Manches¬ 
ter. It seems as quaint a notion to link the feudal name 
with the embodiment of progress as to bind Mazeppa to 
the wild horse, or to turn a monk into a railway stoker. 
The City of Manchester ! It associates in our imagina¬ 
tion the bold baron and the billy roller, the yeomen of 
England in battle array, and the yarns of Houldsworth at 


MANCHESTER. 


127 


so much a pound, streaming banners and steam engines, 
castles and calicoes. Honorary, we apprehend, the title 
is, and scarcely in keeping with our unimaginative utili¬ 
tarian views; still its bestowal is a graceful tribute from 
the hand of royalty to our cathedral and cottonocracy; 
and we venture to say that Manchester, though it deals 
as warily and coolly with a charter as with a customer, 
will be none the less loyal for the favour. 

And smile not, gentle reader, when we say that 
Manchester is not destitute of literary fame. Liverpool 
the refined has only produced one man of letters, 
Koscoe, and it certainly makes the most of him. Man¬ 
chester the rude can claim as its natives or residents 
men of the highest rank in science and elegant lite¬ 
rature. Nay, among the poorest of its citizens we 
sometimes find considerable mental accomplishments. 
The 1 Job Legh ’ of ‘ Mary Barton’ is no fiction. We 
have never met with Lancashire operatives, indeed, who 
enjoyed Newton’s ‘ Principia,’ as Mrs. Gaskell asserts is 
sometimes the case; but we certainly know one poor 
decrepit man residing in a back street in the lowest 
part of Manchester, who has published a 1 Flora’ for 
thirty miles round the town, and for a knowledge 
of plants within that circle has probably no equal. 

Manchester, from the very constitution of its society, 
must have its social peculiarities. Many of our wealthy 
citizens began their career as struggling young men, and 
married probably when they were not earning more 
than a.pound a week ; and many poor but enterprising 
young men of our acquaintance are now following in 


128 


MANCHESTER . 


precisely the same track. Some foibles of our citizens 
have been quizzed by aristocratic novelists; but probably 
many of our millionaires would answer jests with the 
old proverb, ‘ Let them laugh that win.’ 

Much has been said and written of our dinner-hour. 
Mercantile Manchester, it must be confessed, dines 
on work days at one o’clock. And why not ? You 
answer, that the best part of the day is thus lost. No 
such thing. ^ A Manchester man is never drowsy after 
dinner; he does not sink to the level of # a boa constric¬ 
tor, and indulge in a cosy, sulky snooze after eating; 
his motto is semper vigilans —wide awake; he knows 
nothing of dreamland; he cares nothing about fairy 
visions. He positively jumps up after despatching 
his beef-steak, and goes to his ledger as if nothing 
had happened. The Manchester stomach is sui generis ; 
it is no more embarrassed by feeding than a steam boiler. 
0 dura mercatorum ilia ! * 

* [The old one o’clock dinner hour is being fast swept away by 
the stream of progress. Among our merchants it is likely to 
become soon a thing of the past. Going back a century and a 
half, Dr. Aikin gives a description of mercantile habits, strikingly 
primitive when placedin contrast with our growing luxuriousness. 
‘An eminent manufacturer,’ he says, ‘in that age (about 1700) 
used to be in his warehouse before six in the morning, accom¬ 
panied by his children and apprentices. At seven they all came 
to breakfast, which consisted of one large dish of water-pottage, 
made of oatmeal, water, and a little salt, boiled thick, and poured 
into a dish. At the side was a pan or bason of milk; and the 
master and apprentices, each with a wooden spoon in his hand, 
without loss of time, dipped into the same dish, and thence into 


MANCHESTER. 


129 


Great wealth is sometimes found among us accom¬ 
panied by a very humble style of living. Not many 
months ago we called with a friend upon an old lady, 
on a begging expedition. The object we had in view 
was the support of a most praiseworthy institution; and 
all its excellences we brought before her mind as gra¬ 
phically as we could. After an unusual amount of 
parrying and thrusting, she went to a drawer, brought 
out half-a-crown, led us to the door, and said, somewhat 
curtly, ‘ There, sir ; your time is no doubt very valu¬ 
able—I hope this trifle may be of service.’ 

* What think you of that ? ’ we said to our com¬ 
panion, as we walked away. 

‘ Why,’ he answered, ‘ I consider you were very 
hard upon her. She has given handsomely enough 
for her means.’ 

‘ And what do you call her means ! ’ 

1 Well, some twenty shillings a week.’ 

1 You have made but a poor guess, friend,’ we said; 

1 that old jade is worth literally half a million of 
money.’ 

We leave you, kind reader, we trust, with a better 
opinion of Manchester than you entertained a short 
time ago. We are, it must be admitted, a go-ahead 
sort of people. We live extempore. Our merchants 
extemporise fortunes ; our politicians extemporise agi¬ 
tations ; our operatives extemporise riots ; our builders 

the milk pan ; and as soon as it was finished they all returned 
to their work.’— Dr. Aiiciris Description of the Country from 
thirty to forty miles round Manchester. —p. 183.—1866.] 

I. K 


VOL. 


130 


MANCHESTER . 


extemporise whole streets; our clergymen, we verily 
believe, would extemporise a course of 1 Bampton 
Lectures’ on the subtilties of Thomas Aquinas. The 
proverb, 1 most haste, least speed,’ may be sometimes 
applicable to us; but Manchester must keep moving 
onward at all hazards. We can point too with satisfac¬ 
tion to our benevolent institutions. We have an In¬ 
firmary that will bear a comparison, in its management 
and usefulness, with anyin the land ; we have an Asylum 
for the Deaf and Dumb, and one also for the Blind ; 
we have a Hospital for the board and education of orphan 
children; we have a Grammar School of considerable 
eminence; and we have lately converted a Socialists’ 
Hall into a well selected and very extensive Library 
for the free use of the people. Will you not then, 
Southern though you be, join with us in the kindly 
wish at parting —Floreat Mancunium 


131 


XV, 

THE CHURCH AMONG THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 

- ♦- 

Of all realities or idealities that imaginative men have 
personified, none has been sketched under so many dif¬ 
ferent forms and figures as our Established Church. 
Here we see it in the shape of a tottering old lady, 
scarcely able to bear up 4 under the weight of the 
superincumbent hour;’ quack doctors are bustling 
around her, each assiduously recommending his peculiar 
nostrum; but she seems to be sinking gradually from 
mere exhaustion, and to be beyond the reach of Daffy’s 
or any other elixir. Sometimes it appears in the shape 
of a corpulent figure crowned by a mitre, decorated 
with lawn sleeves, and clutching with asthmatic tenacity 
bags of gold and bundles of fines and leases. Sometimes 
it is represented as a dark, suspicious-looking confessor 
in a cowl, attenuated with fasting, extracting delicate 
secrets from the lips of tender young damsels, and im¬ 
posing on them befitting penances. Sometimes it is 
k 2 



132 


THE CHURCH AMONG 


symbolised by one of the working clergy—lean and 
hungry—‘in tattered weeds, with overwhelming brows’ 
—with a wife rich in a numerous progeny,—and a larder 
barely supplied. It assumes its various shapes, according 
to the positions from which men of sportive fancy please 
to view it, or it may be according to the mists and 
vapours of their own minds. How then shall we invest 
it with real consistency and a genuine form ? 

Quo teneam vultus mutantem Protea nodo? 

Perhaps there is none of our national institutions 
which has undergone a more complete change during 
the last century than our Church—a change not so 
much in its abstract constitution as in the character of 
the clergy and the general feeling of its members. At 
the commencement of the last century the religion of 
England was at a very low ebb; the character of the 
clergy was anything but high, and their status in society 
no higher than their morals. We fear that the state¬ 
ments of Macaulay on this matter cannot be controverted. 
Indeed, fifty years ago many of the clergy, especially 
those in secluded districts, were without any question 
very uneducated. Some had been schoolmasters, some 
farmers, some tradesmen; but having been found incom¬ 
petent in their respective duties, by a singular facility 
of conversion, they were turned into parsons. 

Cum faber, incertus scamnum faceretne Priapum, 

Maluit esse deum. 

We can call to mind several specimens of these 
c lights of other days ; ’ not indeed in the brightness of 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


133 


tlieir shining, hut about the time their farthing rush - 
lights were burning in the socket, and going out with 
a somewhat foetid odour. Our memory, though stretch¬ 
ing to the very horizon of childhood, vividly summons 
up the image of our parish minister some thirty }*ears 
ago. A tine old portly farmer-like man he was, in a 
carroty scratch wig of peculiar cut, a coat of black, fast 
fading into invisible green, drab inexpressibles, worsted 
stockings, and ponderous shoes. Agriculture was his 
hobby. ‘ A better farmer ne’er brushed dew from 
lawn.’ He prided himself far more on his pigs than his 
preaching; he was a readier judge of his calves than his 
catechism ; he dreaded the potato-rot more than the 
Pope; he was more cautious against distemper in his 
cattle than dissent in his parish. He preached Tillotson 
abridged, and he cared not who knew it; he clipped 
and dootored Blair, and was not at all discomposed if 
he saw an old lady here and there in tortoise-shell spec¬ 
tacles following him assiduously from the printed book. 
One Sunday morning before the service began, we 
remember, he was warmly discussing with a brother 
farmer the comparative prices which they had obtained 
for their cheese at the fair on the previous day. To his 
great chagrin, his parishioner had beaten him by a few 
shillings in the hundred-weight. Through the service 
he went as usual, perhaps a trifle more reflective ; his 
fifteen minutes’ sermon he despatched in twelve. The 
congregation were moving pensively away, when the 
old gentleman leaned over the pulpit as if pregnant with 
important truth—big with the fate of markets and of 


184 


THE CHURCH AMONG 


cheese—and beckoning the farmer, said in an audible 
whisper, and with a wink of triumph:—Ay but, John! 
—look here—mine were only blue-milks, John !—ha ! 
ha ! only blue-milks ! ’ 

The successors of this race of clergymen generally 
found great difficulty at the commencement of their 
parochial duties. From the easy, hand-in-glove, kind¬ 
ness of their predecessors, the tithes had been collected 
either very negligently or not at all. The Church pro¬ 
perty had sunk with the station of its possessors. It 
was so under our good-natured old friend. When he 
died, a gentleman of considerable acquirements and en- 
ergy was appointed to the incumbency. He very pro¬ 
perly commenced by looking to the suspended rights of 
the Church, and from 100Z. a-year he raised the living 
to 600Z. An obnoxious duty this, but an imperative 
one. We remember the substance of a speech delivered 
by an old farmer at one of the parish meetings which 
were held to settle the income of the new vicar. He 
agreed doubtless with his brother in trade and trouble 
described by Cowper: 

Quoth one, ‘ A rarer man than you 
In pulpit none shall hear; 

But yet, methinks, to tell you true, 

You sell it plaguy dear.’ 

‘ Sir,’ said he, addressing the reverend chairman, 

‘ we’re but a plain sort of folks here. I’m seventy years 
old come Martlemas, an sin’ I can mind, we’ve been 
content with a hundred-a-year parson ; we don’t want 
nothing grand nor fine-like; we can do very well, sir_ 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


135 


no offence, sir—we can scrattle on vast farently* wi’ a 
second-hand parson’—raising his voice and looking fully 
convinced of the fact — 1 a second-hand parson, sir.’ 

The class of second-hand parsons, we would fain 
hope, is now altogether defunct—to be ranked with 
Troy as 1 having been,’ or an extinct species of animals, 
one of which some peeping geologist has rooted up in 
a fossil state from the bowels of the earth. In West¬ 
moreland, Cumberland, and some of the northern coun¬ 
ties, however, clergymen may still be found in very 
primitive simplicity— ut prisca gens mortalium ; not 
troubling themselves about book-learning, but rather 
inclining to the sentiment of the wise man, that 1 in 
much study is a weariness of the flesh ; ’ not dreaming 
of El Dorado speculations in cotton, or corn, or scrip— 
omni soluti foenore ; indifferent about patriotic schemes 
for the regeneration of their perishing country ; spend¬ 
ing their days in the quiet enjoyment of rural occupa¬ 
tions, and in an easy association with their flocks, 
quadrupedal and bipedal. In the fastnesses of the Lake 
districts Arcadia still lingers. Popery is there spoken 
of as something that exists somewhere over the sea; 
dissent has never agitated those primeval valleys; those 
pine-clad crags have never echoed the thunders of the 

* We have heard this word derived—whimsically, it may be, 
rather than well—from ‘ fair ’ and ‘ clean.’ Mrs. Gaskell {Mary 
Barton) quotes the following line as showing the ancient use of 
the vord— 

‘And hir hatir (attire) was well farand.’ —Robert db Brunn. 


136 


THE CHURCH AMONG 


Vatican or the moans of the methodist. No rural 
policeman has made love to the rustic daughters of 
those old-world homesteads; no riding postman has 
penetrated those frowning passes; the cattle browsing 
on those hill-sides have never been startled by the 
whistle and growl of the steam-engine; no monarchical 
George Hudson has bound those rocks and fells in 
his iron girdle. Look at those mountains of granite; 
with their time-honoured brows and weather-beaten 
faces, they mock the whole tribe of Brunei, and laugh 
to scorn even a provisional committee. Herodotus, in 
his second book—we cannot quote, never having liked 
that book—speaks of the Nile flowing in solitary gran¬ 
deur, unexplored by the eye of man, for thousands of 
years. We can almost say the same of these sacred 
vales, except that some parchment-visaged Cockney 
tourist, with his Wellington boots, India-rubber straps, 
and silver-headed cane, now and then pokes his sacri¬ 
legious nose into their penetralia. 

An energetic clerical friend of ours, about fifteen 
years ago, being on a tour through these districts, was 
requested to take the Sunday duty in one of those 
humble chapels that are scattered over the country. 

‘ Ye need na gang intil the pulpit,’ was the sugges¬ 
tion of the old clerk; ‘our minister bides i’ th’ desk 
for his sermon.’ 

Our friend did not see why he should not go into 
the pulpit; but perceiving that the old man was very 
anxious to carry his point, he consented to remain in 
the reading-desk. Nothing occurred during the prayers 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS . 


137 


worthy of remark. The rustic choir ceased, and our 
friend commenced his discourse. At first all went on 
as usual; but, as he warmed by degrees, he kept up 
an unceasing and increasing battery on the old Bible. 
Singularly enough with every thump, he was perplexed 
by a retaliatory rustle behind him—at first mysterious 
and subdued—-then distinctly audible—then alarming; 
when, after an emphatic knock and a Hibernian stamp, 
lo! a sitting goose fluttered to the top of the pulpit, 
and emitted an angry maternal hiss within an inch of 
his ear, which effectually dissipated his fourthly, fifthly, 
and finally. 

1 Lor’ a mercy ! Lor’ a mercy ! ’ was the old clerk’s 
exclamation, when the service was over; ‘ what a pelt¬ 
ing an’ a thumping ye do mak’; ye’ve riven th’ auld 
Bible i’ tow;* and ye’ve scaured th’ best auld sitting 
goose in M—dale parish ! ’ 

But we must leave the church among the mountains, 
to investigate the present condition of the Church among 
the tall Chimneys. And here let us pay our humble 
tribute of thanks to Mr. Horace Mann, for that judicious 
and well-arranged Report on Religious Worship in 
England and Wales , which he has lately issued. It 
has supplied us with information which has been long 
wanted; and that too with an accuracy of reasoning 
and an abundance of statistical tables which could only 
be the result of laborious calculation and patient research. 
It requires no ordinary powers of mind to invest, as Mr. 


* In pieces—in two. 


138 


THE CHURCH AMONG 


Mann has done, the dry figures of a Blue Book with the 
attractions of a work of fancy.* 

The problem is one of considerable interest and im¬ 
portance : a population given, what is the proportion of 
sittings in the various places of public worship which is 
sufficient for the accommodation of all who can possibly 
attend ? In other words, if, in any particular district, all 
the inhabitants were to be present at their respective 
churches or chapels, who could by possibility attend* 
what per cent, of sittings would be enough for the 
accommodation of them all ? Mr. E. Baines assumes 
that 50 per cent, would suffice, even in towns, where 
the proportion must necessarily be higher than in thinly 
populated districts; some have thought that it would 
require 75 per cent.; Dr. Chalmers, taking the mean, 
surmised that 62^ per cent, would be the most accurate 
computation. Mr. Horace Mann, in his Report, has 
come to the conclusion, after a process of careful induc¬ 
tion, that 58 per cent, is about the real proportion 
required. The population of England and Wales is 
17,927,609; but from this aggregate he deducts, as 
unable to attend any place of public worship, 3,000,000 
children, 1,000,000 invalids, 3,278,039 who are en¬ 
gaged in household duties, and a considerable num¬ 
ber who are employed on public conveyances. ‘ Not 
attempting,’ he proceeds, ‘ any numerical estimate of 
various minor classes, and designedly not making any 
deduction on account of Sunday traders, or the criminal 

* Religious Worship in England and Wales. By authority of 
the Registrar-General.—1854. 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS, 


139 


population—since the object is to show the amount ot 
accommodation needed for those who are able , not merely 
for those who are willing , to attend—it seems to follow 
from the previous computations that about 7,500,000 
persons will of necessity be absent whenever divine ser¬ 
vice is celebrated; and, consequently, that sittings in 
religious buildings cannot be required for more than 
10,427,609, being rather more than 58 per cent, of the 
entire community.’ 

This may be laid down as the standard proportion 
whereby the spiritual provision or destitution of our 
land may be calculated. There are however other 
important elements that enter into the problem. 

In order to he adequate to the wants of the community, the 
buildings which should contain these 10,398,013 sittings must be 
so located on the surface of the country as to bring the accommo¬ 
dation they afford within the reach of all by whom it is required. 
If many churches and chapels be clustered in a narrow compass, 
or if several thinly peopled parishes have each a church with 
more accommodation than is wanted, it will follow that in other 
portions of the country there must necessarily be some deficiency, 
unless the aggregate of sittings be raised above 10,398,013. So 
that what is wanted is, not merely such a number of sittings as 
shall equal the total number of persons capable of using them, 
but also such a distribution of these sittings as will render them 
available by all requiring them.* 

Now, it appears from the Eeport that the aggregate of 
sittings in England and Wales almost reaches the 58 per 
cent, of the population. The total number in all the places 
of pub.lic worship is 10,212,563 ; the utmost number of 


* Beligious Worship, etc. 


140 


THE CHURCH AMONG 


persons who can attend public worship at any one time 
has been computed at 10,398,013 ; so that taking the 
whole surface of the country, the deficiency of church 
and chapel room is only 185,450 sittings, or 1*03 per 
cent. If however we compare the rural with the urban 
districts, we find that the former contain 66 per cent, of 
sittings, the latter only 46. And if we take into account 
the large towns only, we discover that the number of 
inhabitants in each, and the amount of religious accom¬ 
modation are in an inverse ratio. 

If we take the •whole kingdom, we find that the 
Church accommodation exceeds that provided by all 
other religious denominations, in the proportion of 
5,317,915 to 4,894,648 sittings. If however we con¬ 
fine ourselves to the populous districts, we discover that 
the excess of accommodation is on the side of the Non¬ 
conformist body. 

When we examine the progress of Church building in 
populous places, we confess to a species of disappointment 
at the result of our investigation. Extraordinary efforts 
doubtless have been made by the well-wishers of the 
Established Church, but no less extraordinary has been 
the rapidity with which our town-populations have 
increased. Thus, if we compare the present spiritual 
provision of our manufacturing towns with that of the 
year 1801, we do not find that it has advanced at 
all in proportion to the population. Still, if we look 
back only over the last thirty years, the retrospect is 
agreeable, as exhibiting much religious energy and zeal, 
and affording lively encouragement for the future:— 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


141 


Taken in the gross, (says the Beport, that is, including all 
religious denominations,) our rate of progress during the last 
thirty years has not been altogether unsatisfactory. Previous to 
1821, the population increased faster than accommodation for re¬ 
ligious worship, so that while, from 1801 to 1821, the former 
had increased from 8,892,536 persons to 12,000,236 (or 34 9 per 
cent.), the latter, during the same interval, had only increased 
from 5,171,122 sittings to 6,094,486 (or 17*8 per cent.), and the 
proportion of sittings to population, which in 1801 was 58‘1 per 
cent., had declined in 1821 to less than 51 per cent. But from 
1821 to the present time the course of things has changed ; the 
rate of increase of the population has continually declined, while 
that of religious accommodation has steadily advanced; so that 
while the number of the people has been raised from 12,000,236 
to 17,927,609 (an increase of 49-4 per cent.), the number of 
sittings has been raised from 6,094,486 to 10,212,563 (or an in¬ 
crease of 67 6 per cent.), and the proportion of sittings to popu¬ 
lation, which in 1821 was 508 per cent., had risen in 1851 to 
57 per cent. 

Mr. Mann gives us, next, several Tables illustrating 
the comparative increase of population and Church 
accommodation in town and country. 

It hence appears (the Report proceeds) that the towns have by 
no means had a share proportionate to their need, in the liberality 
which, during the last half century, has added 19,387 places of 
worship, and 5,041,440 sittings to the accommodation existing in 
1801. For although the increase of provision in towns has been 
174 per cent, in the 50 years, while the increase in the country 
parts has not exceeded 66 per cent.; yet such has been the more 
rapid increase of population in the former than in the latter (156 
percent, against 65 per cent.), that the accommodation in towns 
in proportion to the population is scarcely less deficient than it 
was in 1801^-viz., 45 sittings to every 100 persons instead of 42 ; 
while the accommodation for the rest of England will still suffice 
for as many as 70 out of every 100 of the rural population. 


142 


TEE CHURCH AMONG 


Taking another area as the basis of our calculations, 
let us consider, for a moment, the increase of Church 
accommodation in the ancient diocese of Chester, which 
contained most of our manufacturing towns. On the 
institution of this bishopric, in 1541, there were 327 
churches in the diocese, a number sufficient for its spi¬ 
ritual wants. From the year 1541 to 1828, only 186 
new ones were erected, though, during that period, the 
population increased enormously. From 1828 the pre¬ 
sent Archbishop of Canterbury presided over the see of 
Chester for nearly twenty years, during which time 233 
churches were built, about the average of a consecration 
a month. 

That part of Lancashire which forms the new diocese of 
Manchester largely contributed to and participated in (as 
indeed its wants required) this extraordinary augmentation of its 
church accommodation. One hundred and ten of this increased 
number of consecrations took place within its boundaries, and the 
first Bishop of Manchester, in 1848, entered upon his important 
charge over more than a million and a quarter of inhabitants, 
with 300 churches, and nearly 500 clergy. During the last half 
century, the number of parochial clergy within the same limits 
has been augmented from 199 to 501; the churches from 170 to 
326; and the sittings in the churches from 102,000 to above 
286,000—the proportion of sittings for the operative classes 
being as 13 free seats to 19 appropriated or rented. During the 
last decade (1841 to 1851) the population of the diocese has in¬ 
creased 19| per cent., and the church accommodation 21£ percent.* 

* Appeal of the Manchester Diocesan Church Building Society. 
1854. [This was written in 1854. Dr. Lee, during his episco¬ 
pate of seventeen years, has consecrated upwards of a hundred 
churches; with very few exceptions, new ones.—1866.] 


THE 1ALL CHIMNEYS. 


143 


The number of the clergy in the manufacturing dis¬ 
tricts having increased so rapidly, it follows, almost as 
a necessary consequence, that they are of a somewhat 
mixed order. To meet the \vants of our multiplying 
population, cargoes of Irish clergymen have been un¬ 
shipped at the port of Liverpool, on the one side, while, 
on the other, legions of recruits have invaded from 
the College of St. Bees. Waggish laymen designate 
the Irishmen ‘ Hittites,’ and the St. Bees-men ‘ Hivites.’ 
Oxford and Cambridge send their quota. Let us take a 
glance at the beau ideal of each class—not, remember, as 
a fair specimen of the species, but as exhibiting its 
peculiarities when fully developed. 

The Irish curate is a clergyman sui generis , when 
seen in his perfect state. He may have been in a con¬ 
genial element, as he was annihilating priests and conver¬ 
ting papists, in the parish of Blarney,but transplanted on 
to English soil, he resembles a wild mountain-flower in 
a green-house, or an oak in a flower-pot. His ideas are on 
a scale much too large for our homely conceptions ; his 
habits are too belligerent for the phlegmatic Saxon; his 
general tone of thought and feeling does not square with 
English notions of exactness and propriety. He thinks 
odd things, and he says odd things, and he does odd 
things, and if any one doubts their propriety, he lays 
his hand on his heart, and affirms that his conscience 
compels him so to act. Suppose him thrown by some 
dispensation into the ministry of a district somewhat 
populous, reasonably peaceable, and undistinguished 
by any prominent features. Suppose this to be, not 
at a period of papal aggression, but in quiet times. 


144 


THE CHURCH AMONG 


Nobody knows whether county Wicklow or county 
Meath claims the honour of his Lucinian debut , and 
nobody cares a great deal. Mark his appearance! 
Behold his black whiskers, straggling hair, unstrapped 
trousers, and rollicking gait. His linen is not always 
the cleanest. His waistcoat has lost one or two buttons, 
and has a greasy, corrugated air about it; but beneath 
that waistcoat, sir, uninviting as it looks, there is 
bounding the heart of a juvenile Hugh M’Neile. Maybe 
it has thumped off the buttons. He delights in preaching 
and lecturing and extemporising at all seasons, and in 
all places, and ‘ at the shortest possible notice.’ He 
is a peripatetic sound—a vox perambulans — 

0 Patrick, shall I call thee man, 

Or but a wandering voice ? * 

In a few months after his arrival, he announces from 
the pulpit that, on the next Sabbath evening, he will 
discuss the doctrine of purgatory. He inserts a para¬ 
graph to the same effect in the 1 Church and State 
Independent.’ Opposition is raised against him. Skir¬ 
mishers are thrown out on both sides. Then follows a 
course of Lectures on the ‘ Errors of Rome.’ Women 
prick up their ears, and welcome the controversy. No¬ 
body loves a wrangle better than the women—especially 
a religious one. The poor, who had never before 

* [This probably may be a new reading of Wordsworth’s 
lines: 

‘ 0 cuckoo, shall I call thee bird, 

Or but a wandering voice ?’—1866.] 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


145 


attended a place of worship, flock to hear, for there 
is a game of abuse going on. Pious females ejaculate, 
in the fulness of their hearts, 1 See how much good 
Mr. O’Blazeaway is doing ! ’ A paper controversy 
follows between our hero and some Romish partisan, 
in which nothing suffers so much as the logic of 
Whately and the rules of Lindley Murray. Still our 
friend is hailed by the ladies as a Goliath on the side 
of truth. Can such volubility and whiskers do wrong? 
He is puffed out with congratulations and crumpets; 
he is deluged with tea and toadyism. The charm 
works apace; the tide of popularity is at the full; 
when, lo ! after two or three young ladies have been 
preached into fits, some fat dowagers have been voci¬ 
ferated into convulsions, and a married female or two 
been shrieked into a 1 misfortune,’ the sensible portion 
of the people begin to ask, in the words of a wondering 
prelate, ‘ What is all this about V By degrees a change 
comes over the spirit of this dream; the popularity of 
our champion begins to wane; some dare to fancy, with 
Fluellen, that ‘ he is not the man that he would gladly 
make show to the ’orld he is; ’ a few frantic damsels 
fight desperately in his behalf, but they are a forlorn 
hope. He is going—going—gone. And when, after a 
three years’ racket in his curacy, he goes away to some 
other to challenge the Papists, either all together, or 
one go down and the other come on, he leaves behind 
a boiling lava-mass of hatred, and rancour, and venom, 
which *is destined to scald his successor for the whole 
term of his sojourn. 

VOL. i. L 


146 


THE CHURCH AMONG 


The clergyman from St. Bees is a different character. 
The period of preparation for the ministry at this 
institution is two years; the actual residence each 
year is about eight months. The annual cost, in¬ 
cluding expenses educational and personal, need not 
be more than 50/. The members of St. Bees are 
men who, in the great majority of cases, have com¬ 
menced life in some trade or profession, . either as 
clerks, Or apprentices, or principals. National school¬ 
masters arid lay visitors go there in considerable num¬ 
bers. From these antecedents it would not be difficult 
to sketch, a priori , the type of a St. Bees’ graduate. He 
is often a very well-meaning, amiable sort of person; 
but, rising all at once from the counter or school¬ 
master’s desk to the pulpit, he runs the hazard of 
a dizzied brain. We do not expect from him a fault¬ 
less accuracy of intonation and delicacy of taste. He 
has a strong tendency to preach his prayers and to pray 
his sermons. He is often loud in his aspirations—lax 
in his aspirates. He out-Herods Herod in the massacre 
of the h’s. He loves the tea-tables of the substantial 
middle-class. There he is much at his ease; he is 
every inch a lion at feeding time—a very monster 
among muffins and maiden ladies. Peradventure, if 
very aspiring, he mounts a shovel hat, purchases a 
foreign degree for a five pound note, and adopts the 
Oxford hood. He publishes an unreadable sermon 
by request (of his wife?), and advertises that the 
profits (!) are to go to the expenses of his Sunday 
school. He receives legs of mutton and flitches of 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


147 


bacon from aged ladies. He kisses the children of 
his congregation, and shakes hands with his Sunday 
scholars, all round. And though unluckily he has 
not a fair start with the Irishman in the race of 
popularity, being a husband of middle age, somewhat 
corpulent, and the father of four fine children, he is 
nevertheless pronounced by oracular wives and widows 
to be ‘a powerful expounder,’ ‘ a dear creature,’ ‘ a 
charming man.’ 

The perfect type of an Oxford or a Cambridge man 
differs, toto ccelo , from the two pictures we have 
drawn. His dress is precise in the extreme. His 
white neckerchief would not have disgraced Brummell 
the beau; and his silk waistcoat, wrapping round his 
throat, is irreproachable. He is reputed to fast twice 
in the week. He is pale, interesting, and cadaverous; 
and an object of respectful admiration with young ladies 
of a sentimental turn and a mediaeval taste. He has 
reflected on the Church as an abstraction, much as 
he has studied the ‘Kepublic’of Plato; and, after 
having modelled something very beautiful in his ima¬ 
gination, he brings it down with him to his parish. He 
has mixed little in general society. He has lwed among 
books, and associated exclusively with his own clique of 
fellow-students; and, after dreaming on his Fellowship 
several years within the walls of a college, he enters 
upon his ministerial duties, knowing as much about 
the character of an English population as he does 
about-the people of Timbuctoo. He finds everything 
miserably out of order in his church and district; and 
l 2 


148 


THE CHURCH AMONG 


regarding men’s opinions and feelings as very trifles 
when weighed with his theory, he sets about changing 
the whole parochial system as there existing. He 
dresses his choristers in white; he intones the service ; 
he preaches in his surplice; he indoctrinates his hearers 
with the true notion of a Church; he enlarges on the 
subject of oecumenical councils to hand-loom weavers. 
And thus he goes on, from week to week, intoning 
the prayers most unmusically, preaching up his abstract 
Church most unintelligibly, and recommending, most 
whimsically, fasts as a duty on those to whom they 
are too often a necessity. He is, suppose, in a manu¬ 
facturing district, where love of music and hatred of 
Popery are almost innate. The people say he has 
little more music in him than a donkey, and no more 
doctrine than a Papist. Thus, he regards his people 
as so many Goths, and they regard him as but one 
remove from an idiot or a Romish priest. The breach 
widens; ‘ no surrender’ is the motto of our hero of 
the Church Militant; and in a very short time he 
has to propound his abstruse theories of a Church to 
the verger, the choristers, and three old women to 
whom he distributes alms. 

Let no one mistake our meaning. We merely intro¬ 
duce these sketches as the full-blown developments of 
the various systems. We believe that such personages 
as we have described are exceptional. Clergymen may 
here and there attract attention from their peculiarities, 
and from the very fact of their singularity may occupy 
a larger space than they deserve in the observation of 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


149 


others ; but we are firm in the conviction that the great 
body of them are sound and moderate in their views. 
And even where such specimens of the ministerial cha¬ 
racter are found, we have mostly observed that experience 
tends by degrees to smooth down their rough and ex¬ 
crescent surfaces. Pebbles shaken together in a bag lose 
their angularities, and assume a mutual similitude ; and 
we are sanguine enough to believe that among rough- 
hewn clergymen the assimilating tendency is towards the 
mean of good taste and propriety. 

If we desire to take an impartial view of our spiritual 
condition as a nation, and to devise the most suitable 
means for its improvement, one important element of 
inquiry is—How far do the people avail themselves 
of the religious accommodation that is really available ? 
According to a rough estimate in the * Keport,’ it is 
calculated that on the third Sunday in March, 1851, 
when the census was taken, there were in actual atten¬ 
dance at religious worship throughout the whole of 
England about the half of those who had an opportunity 
of attending. From a numerical comparison between 
the members of the Church, and those of all the 
remaining religious sections who attended public worship 
on that day, we find that the scales are very evenly 
balanced. 

The Church of England had attending its three services more 
persons than all other bodies put together (3,773,474 against 
3,487,558), but the number of attendances given by the 3,773,474 
is actually less than the number given by the 3,487,558; the 
former having attended 5,292,551 times, while the latter attended 
5,603,515 times. 


150 


THE CHURCH AMONG 


From our own experience of the habits of the poor in 
manufacturing districts, we do not hesitate to say that 
but a very small proportion of the adults attend any 
church, chapel, or conventicle whatever. The grand 
problem, be assured, is after all—not so much, how 
many places of worship have we to build ? but, how 
to get the operative classes to attend those that we have? 
New churches are undoubtedly required; and may 
they be completed forthwith ; but beyond question the 
spiritual apathy of the people is our most gigantic anta¬ 
gonist. It would be extremely short-sighted to keep 
this out of consideration in the erection of fresh churches, 
and the formation of future ecclesiastical districts. 

Many suggestions have been thrown out, and theories 
devised, for infusing vitality into this spiritual deadness; 
but, after much observation and some personal partici¬ 
pation in the effort, we must confess that the problem 
remains yet unsolved. We respect the Hon. and Rev. 
Sidney Godolphin Osborne for his boldness in denouncing 
and zeal in reforming Church abuses; but we very 
much doubt whether his gig-bishops and plain preaching 
houses would stir up the stagnant hearts of our people.* 
Many attempts have been made to instil a love of 
religious worship into their minds, and many failures 
have been experienced. The experiment related by 
Dr. Chalmers in his Christian and Economic Polity 1 is 
not the only one of the kind; but we do not imagine 
that such trials have ever been attended with continued 

* Meliora, Second Series. Immortal Sewerage , by the Hon. 
and Rev. Grodolphin Osborne. 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


151 


success. We would not, in writing thus, be supposed 
to preach despondency or to afford an apology for in¬ 
difference ; but we wish the nature of the undertaking to 
be rightly estimated, that sanguine men may not experi¬ 
ence unnecessary disappointment, and sincere men may 
not be blamed for failure. One well-meaning person has 
his theory and another his nostrum—neither of whom 
probably has ever set his foot in a poor man’s cottage. 
His own particular torch has only to be applied to the 
mine, and the citadel of darkness and crime will be 
1 hurled on high,’ and its ghostly defenders— 

All that of living or dead remain 
In one wild roar expire. 

These however are the expectations of men who see 
visions and dream dreams. A nation’s torpor cannot be 
dissipated by the pop-gun of a pamphlet; a people’s 
darkness cannot be illuminated by the lucifer-match of 
a speech ; this can no more be done than ‘ the sun can 
be turned into ice, by fanning in his face with a peacock’s 
feather.’ 

What then do you recommend ? we may imagine 
some inquirer to retort. Our answer would be :—Do not 
indulge in extravagant expectations; but, nevertheless, 
zealous in aiming at the attainment of your object; 
many forces must be concentrated on the work. First, 
bring as powerful an external agency as you can against 
this citadel of mental inaction and moral slumber; 
secondly, eliminate from this fortress as far as possible 
all those causes which conduce to engender spiritual 
apathy and resistance to religious influences. 


152 


THE CHURCH AMONG 


Among external agencies we would recommend, first, 
a considerable increase in the clerical staff. The more 
extended the operations of an army, the weaker become 
its different positions. So, in the late enlargement of 
church accommodation, many points of occupation have 
been left in a state of comparative weakness. In order 
therefore to render our lines more compact, the cry 
now, according to our notion, should be for more clergy¬ 
men. Nobly as the two Societies for providing additional 
curates have exerted themselves, a large increase of 
ministerial agency is still required. An energetic 
clergyman is inducted into a town incumbency, with a 
charge of some six or seven thousand souls. When 
fairly settled, how does he find his time occupied ? He 
has his National and Infant schools to superintend ; he 
has his Night schools also to direct, which occupy his 
time on certain evenings in the week; he has his Sunday 
schools to keep in order, the class-lists to revise, and the 
truant scholars to inquire after; he has to manage the 
financial department of all these, and with the trouble 
to assume much pecuniary responsibility; when the 
period of Confirmation comes round he has to prepare 
for the rite some two hundred young persons, in five or 
six separate classes; he has to preside over clothing 
societies, sick clubs, district visiting committees and 
teachers’ meetings; he has to visit the wealthier portion 
of his congregation; he has ten or twenty sick persons 
on his list, upon whom he can hardly devote less than 
two or three hours every day, Sunday excepted; he 
has frequent applications from the poor, to transact for 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


153 


them small matters of business and correspondence, 
which they are unable to manage for themselves; he 
has two sermons to prepare every week, besides 
occasional lectures; and when Sunday arrives, he has to 
pass through a day of mental anxiety and physical 
labour, such as laymen can hardly comprehend. All this 
is the parish duty alone — 1 that which cometh upon him 
daily.’ Then he is engaged as a member of committees 
for general purposes—for the management of dispensaries, 
soup-kitchens, and institutions of that nature; he has 
to attend public meetings of the different religious 
societies, and perhaps to act as secretary for one out of 
the many. Added to these occupations, he has his own 
private affairs to regulate, his household to superintend, 
his literary taste to cultivate, and his biblical knowledge 
to advance. Now, with these calls upon his time it is 
next to an impossibility for him, single-handed and 
alone, to pursue a systematic course of visiting from 
house to house. He is, moreover, surrounded by a mi¬ 
gratory population; he has great difficulty in meeting 
with the heads of families, from their daily employment 
in the mills, and in many whom he does find at home 
he sees everything to discourage. Youthful energy may 
endure this for a time, but, after awhile, either the 
zeal must cool or the strength must fail. 

A larger force of clergymen then is our first demand. 
Next, let them be better paid. It is lamentable to 
reflect on the social position of many Church ministers 
in the. manufacturing districts. Harassed by their daily 
impediments and toils, beset by importunities for 


154 


THE CHUBCH AMONG 


charitable objects of every kind, uncertain sometimes how 
to procure the necessaries of life, their lot, believe us, is 
often none of the most enviable. Compelled to make a 
decent appearance, and expected to associate with the 
higher ranks of society, they are invested with a sort of 
splendida paupertas , which, to our fancy, is less 
becoming than the blue barragon coat of the butcher, 
or the calico jacket of the green-grocer, or the smock- 
frock of the waggoner. In the zeal for church building 
which has shown itself during the last quarter of a 
century, however laudable the object, it has been too 
much the custom to raise the fabric, and then repose in 
the idea that the work was complete. A church is run 
up in one of the poorest districts, where there is 
scarcely a single resident above the rank of an operative; 
the legal endowment of 1000Z. is procured; and the 
minister’s income is to be made up of pew-rents ! Far 
be it from us to exhibit even an appearance of ingratitude 
for the plans which have been adopted of late years for 
increasing the value of small livings; those measures 
have been an incalculable boon, in relieving many an 
unknown want, and assisting many a silent struggle, 
and wiping away many a secret tear. But most of our 
lately built churches, being under the patronage of trus¬ 
tees, have not been eligible to receive grants; and for 
several years past unfortunately the fund which was at the 
disposal of the Ecclesiastical Commission has been 
exhausted. The income of many incumbents is still a 
very miserable pittance. Not forgetting the permanent 
aid rendered by the Commission to many poor livings, and 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


155 


taking into account the incumbencies created under Sir 
E. Peel’s admirable Act—the minimum value of which 
is 150/. a-year—we have reason to believe that of the 
three hundred churches which have been built during 
the last twenty-five years in the dioceses of Chester and 
Manchester, the average annual income of the incum¬ 
bents is not more than 150/., while that of the curates, 
where there are such, is about 90/. Eeader, are you a 
father indulging in the pleasing dream that a fat living 
will one day fall to the lot of little Timothy, who is 
tumbling before you on the carpet ? When the sturdy 
cub grows up, send him to the 1 Diggings ’ with a pickaxe 
and a brace of revolvers; or to Canada to fight with 
bears and fraternise with Eed Indians, to hug squaws 
and hew down stumps of trees ; but do not allow him 
to enter the ministry of the Church, if you are looking 
for him to acquire wealth and greatness there as a 
necessary consequence. Timothy, no doubt, will prove 
a finer specimen of the species than most of his contem¬ 
poraries ; but thus much we know—that many a smart 
fellow has left Oxford with philosophy enough to wrap 
into a peripatetic academy, and Greek sufficient to bind 
into a quarto edition of Scapula, and has never received 
from the Church an average of 5 per cent, yearly on his 
educational outlay.* 

* ‘ On another occasion, my father mentioned the following 
anecdote, which had been related to him by Mr. Child the 
banker, who desired to have a valet. One of these gentry pre¬ 
sented himself, and inquired what wine Mr. Child allowed at the 
second table. “ Port and sherry,” replied Mr. Child. “ I like a 
glass of Madeira, sir,” returned the valet. “ Why,” said Mr. 


156 


THE CHUBCH AMONG 


But further—we would venture to recommend, not 
only a more numerous and better paid staff of clergymen, 
but a somewhat nicer care in the selection of them. 
There is a great advantage in the fact that the English 
clergy are taken from all classes; but there may be 
disadvantages also, if the infusion from any single grade 
be disproportionately large. The conditions of ordination 
seem to us to be somewhat too easy in the present day ; 
they are certainly easier of fulfilment than those re¬ 
quired for admission into ordinary trades and profes¬ 
sions. Two years at St. Bees, with a moderate stock of 
information to begin with—a similar discipline at St. 
Aidan’s, Birkenhead—two short visits in the year to 
Trinity, Dublin, extending over four years, the under¬ 
graduate the while following his occupation in England 
—the theological courses at King’s ^College, London, at 
Durham at Queen’s College, Birmingham, and at sundry 
Diocesan institutions, not to mention the Universities 
of Oxford and Cambridge,—these are for choice as the 
existing preliminaries to ordination; and few are too 
poor or too illiterate to fulfil them.* 

Child, “ there is a curate of the parish here cannot afford himself 
a glass of wine of any sort.” “ Ah! ” replied the valet, shrug¬ 
ging his shoulders, “ I always pitied that sort of gentleman! ” ’ 
— Memoirs of Dr. H. Bathurst, Bishop of Norwich , p. 428. 

* In these days of University reform would it not be possi¬ 
ble to bring about such an arrangement as the following, in order 
to counteract the preponderance of Local Colleges ? That a new 
degree of S.S.T., Scholar in Sacred Theology, be instituted in the 
Universities of Oxford and Cambridge—that students be allowed 
to proceed to such degree after a residence of two years —that 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


157 


There may possibly be some good consequences 
resulting from this. There may be thus a closer union 
maintained between the Church and the middle class in 

the necessary examinations for it be the ordinary responsions, or 
moderations, and a final examination, similar to the Voluntary 
Theological at Cambridge. That the Scholar in Divinity be 
allowed to proceed to the degree of B.D. at the end of ten years 
from his being admitted a member of the University, upon his 
performing the usual exercises for that degree. That the 
Scholar in Divinity may at any future time proceed to the de¬ 
gree of B.A. after an additional residence and passing the usual 
examination. The expenses for a year (24 weeks) at Cambridge 


may be calculated as follows:— 

Tutor (present pensioner’s payment) . . £10 0 0 

College charges.8 0 0 

Lodgings.12 0 0 

Hall.12 12 0 

Breakfast and Tea.5 0 0 

Fire.4 0 0 

Laundress.4 0 0 

£bo 12 0 


[This article was written in 1854. We are aware that some¬ 
thing has been done since that time in cheapening an Oxford 
course. But we still think that greater facilities might be granted 
to the poorer candidates for Holy orders, for passing through the 
curriculum of our ancient Universities; and we venture to believe, 
too, that a project of this kind has as strong a claim on our 
consideration as the institution of middle-class examinations, 
which are now so fashionable. We had scarcely finished the last 
senl^nce, when we saw that an influential meeting had just been 
held at Oxford, for the purpose of devising some plan whereby 
young men of limited means might pass through the curriculum 
of the University, and come out as graduates. We hail this 
movement as consisted with the spirit of the age. Why should 
Oxford remain unmoved, while the stream of progress is gliding 
by her ancient walls?—1866.] 








158 


THE CHURCH AMONG 


manufacturing towns; but we have grave suspicions 
whether, on the whole, the evil does not outweigh the 
good. Many dangers are attendant on the exercise of 
ministerial functions by those who are but imperfectly 
conversant with the usages of good society. For 
example: a curate is hand-in-glove with a certain 
clique; he expounds to the old ladies, and with the 
young ones he carries on that species of semi-platonic 
flirtation which involves the mixed ideas of religion and 
roast-beef, mortification and mince-pies, carnal deadness 
and, creature comforts; he uses the ordinary arts of 
gaining popularity, and succeeds in his object. In pro¬ 
cess of time he comes into collision with his incumbent; 
and, after a series of criminations and recriminations, he 
receives notice to quit: a fierce contest agitates the con¬ 
gregation ; one portion throw up their seats, abuse the 
incumbent, present the injured curate with a purse of 
gold and a teapot, and peradventure build him a church 
near the very spot which he has quitted. Now we are 
constrained to say that these turmoils, so injurious to 
the cause of practical religion, originate most frequently 
with clergymen who are but imperfectly acquainted 
with the usages and sentiments of refined society. 

There is a species of reproach cast upon the clergy 
in the Cambridge proverb, that popular preachers are 
manufactured out of the ‘ Twelve Apostles.’* In this 
jest there is some truth, though it must be taken cum 

grano salis. But upon what principle does it contain 

* 

* The dozen at the bottom of the examination list—so hope¬ 
lessly bad that no ingenuity can class them. 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


159 


any truth ? We apprehend that it may be thus ac¬ 
counted for. It not unfrequently happens that men 
of attenuated minds have very expansive pretensions. 
Now when such happen to be preachers, they often 
overlay the nothingness of their matter by the ex¬ 
travagance of their action; and, especially in the 
manufacturing districts, there is a singular attrac¬ 
tiveness in what is wild, vehement, and grotesque. 

‘ My goodness! ’ we once heard an old woman ex¬ 
claim, speaking of a clerical ‘ star,’—‘ a gradely good 
talker he was ; his words rattled about like hailstones, 
and the cushion-dust riz like a hurricane, and his arms 
twirled like a windmill.’ 

‘Well,’ we said, ‘did you profit by it all, Betty? 
Did you understand what he said ? ’ 

‘ Ay, Lord love you ! ’ was the old lady’s humble 
reply—‘ I’se ne’er presume—I’se ne’er oss.’ * 

Again, would it not be practicable to extend our lay 
agency more widely and systematically than it has yet 
been employed? The lay visitor from habit and manner 
is frequently better fitted to reach the masses than the 


* [‘A verb in very common use among the people of this 
county, as everybody who lives in it must be well aware, is “ to 
oss,” having the signification “ to try, or to attempt.” Bay says 
of the word, “ forte ab audeo, ausus ; ” but surely we have it 
much nearer, both in sound and in meaning, in the Welsh verb, 
“ osi,” to offer to do, to attempt, which is exactly the significa¬ 
tion of the Lancashire word.’ (The Bev. W. Graskell, M. A.) 
May net the word have a derivative connection with the French 
oser ?—1866. 


160 


THE CHURCH AMONG 


clergyman; lie is more homely in his conversation—. 
more intelligible—and is regarded with less suspicion 
by the very careless among the poor; he has also his 
whole time to devote to parochial visiting. When we 
consider the enormous sums which are raised by our 
societies for foreign objects, and the ecclesiastical funds 
which may be made available for the extension of 
religious truths at home, it is not too much to hope 
that ere long we may have a more systematic and 
enlarged employment of lay visitors or catechists. 

Passing from the living agency of the Church, glance 
for a moment at the material building of stone and 
mortar. We cannot but feel that out of the hundreds 
of Churches built in the manufacturing districts within 
the last thirty years, most of them seem to have been 
constructed with the view of deterring the poor from 
public worship. We have before alluded to the pitiful 
way in which our new churches are endowed. What 
are 32 1 . a-year for a clergyman surrounded by an 
indigent population ? 0, but there are the pew-rents 

also! And this cruel mode of reasoning and acting 
induces Christian men to occupy the best places in the 
church with letting pews, and to stick the free sittings 
into some unsightly pigeon-hole or invisible corner. 
These soon become filled with Sunday scholars; the 
pews are only half taken ; the minister is half-starved; 
and the very objects for which the Church was built are 
in a great degree frustrated. Believe us, if you are to 
draw the poor to a place of worship, you must provide 
them with good, open, free sittings—not creaking boards 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


161 


stuck in dingy stifling corners, where they can neither 
see nor hear. Take our advice then, ye into whose 
hearts a desire hath entered of erecting a House of 
God for your poorer brethren. Endow it after a 
reasonable and Christian-like manner. Let not the 
sting rankle in your conscience hereafter, of having 
been in any measure instrumental in placing among 
the poor a pauperized clergy, and committing them 
to the tender mercies of S. G. O.’s rag and cast-off 
clothes society. Allot a sufficient portion of sittings 
in a decent position for your Sunday scholars; and 
let the poor have for nothing, at least as good a place 
before Him who is no respecter of persons, as the rich 
have for their money. 

The Act, passed some five-and-twenty years ago, 
vesting, on certain conditions, the patronage of livings 
in trustees, has been productive of many churches, but 
as a rule not of a kind well suited for a poor district. 
In a neighbourhood where wealthy families reside, and 
there is a deficiency of accommodation for public wor¬ 
ship, the patronage of the Church may be properly 
placed in the hands of private parties. The pew-rents 
will always afford a sufficient income to the incumbent. 
But in poor districts the unendowed Trustee Churches 
are but State institutions for starving unfortunate par¬ 
sons. Sometimes the trustees give the incumbent a sort 
of guarantee for a certain amount of stipend; but the 
effect is almost invariably degrading to him as a 
gentleman, and injurious to him as amoral teacher. 

The patrons of such churches in our manufacturing 
VOL. I. M 


162 


THE CHUBCH AMONG 


towns are men who for the most part are sincere in their 
desire to do good, but who are not always characterised by 
sensibility of feeling and delicacy of demeanour towards 
a clergyman. There is often also much caballing, 
and favouritism, and cliquery, in appointing to such 
churches ; nor, with all the professions of the patrons, can 
we discover any remarkable judgment in their selections. 
We remember an instance where the trustees of a church, 
in a very wealthy and genteel neighbourhood, listened 
with patient magnanimity to upwards of a hundred 
trial sermons, and, after all, chose a pastor—a very good 
man, by the way—who had been a non-conformist, and 
who could not be heard. We should prefer to this 
system of election the scenes at Pidlington, and places 
with a like franchise, where cabs exhibited placards 
decorated with 1 Vote for Higgins and High Church,’ 

‘ Hurrah for Evans and Evangelical Truth,’ with * the 
state of the poll at 12 o’clock.’ 

Having considered some of the external agencies that 
the Church may direct against the moral apathy of 
the people, we may be allowed a few words on those 
internal causes that tend to produce it. 

Never was there a truer expression than that of my 
Lord Palmerston,* that the present age is one of im¬ 
provement, rather than reform ; and we should seek in 
vain for one better qualified than he to carry out enlarged 
views of moral and social advancement, if he would 

* [Then Home Secretary—one more, alas ! whose loss we have 
had so lately to lament, 1866.] 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


163 


really take an interest in such matters. In order to 
ascertain the social evils to be counteracted, consider 
for a moment the domestic economy of a poor man’s 
cottage. Take a common sample of an operative’s 
household. It consists of himself, his wife, and eight 
children, varying from six to twenty-five years of age; 
the earnings of the family amount to 2 1 . 10s. or 3 1 . a 
week. The house has only two bed-rooms, in one of 
which the husband and wife sleep, with some of the 
younger children; in the other the grown-up sons and 
daughters. It is but very poorly ventilated; the back¬ 
door is over-shadowed by dingy buildings, and the six- 
feet square yard is neither agreeable to the eye nor to 
the olfactory sense. On Saturday night the father gets 
drunk; the Sunday is spent by him in the beer-shop, 
or gin-shop, or hush-shop; the wife also ‘likes her drop 
o’ drink.’ Some of the family spend their Sunday over 
a low novel, in which the murders are more delicately 
drawn than the love-scenes ; others attend school on 
that day, and maintain an apparent respectability. Mon¬ 
day morning finds the household without a farthing, 
and with some of their Sunday clothes in the pawn-shop. 
Such is by no means an unusual routine of weekly life 
among the operative classes. ‘There are four preva¬ 
lent evils among us,’ says George Cowell, the Preston 
delegate, in a late speech he made there, ‘ and would 
to God they were abolished! I mean “ popping,” 
“ scotching ” (dealing with packmen), drinking, and 
shopping (taking credit).’ 

Every institution that offers to the working man a 
m 2 


164 


THE CHURCH AMONG 


sound and ready investment for his money, must have a 
beneficial tendency. The Savings’ Bank, the Co-opera¬ 
tive Store, the Building Society, are all more or less with in 
his reach. Saving is one of the first steps to self-respect 
among our operatives. The man whose earnings are 
large, and whose expenses from week to week anticipate 
them, is a self-indulgent, sottish fellow, who is careless 
about the respectability both of himself and his family; 
but only induce him to lay aside a certain sum period¬ 
ically, and to deposit it in some place of investment 
where it will enlarge itself after a spontaneous manner 
while he is sleeping, and he begins to view himself, 
however unconsciously, as a person of increasing im¬ 
portance. He has now a stake in his country and an 
interest in his household. It has been said that a man 
who has a wife and family gives a hostage to society 
for his good behaviour: this may be in part true, 
though we have seen many in these presumedly happy 
circumstances who have set but small account on their 
hostages. Suppose him, however, to have 50 1 . at interest 
and to be gradually adding to this sum, and you will 
seldom find him to be other than a peaceable and praise¬ 
worthy citizen. He is not found telling his audience at 
the lamp-post that 1 the time is out of joint,’ and that 
he is born to set and bind up the dislocated member; 
he is not incessantly engaged in tinkering that much- 
abused article, the British Constitution. He has begun 
to leave such moon-struck schemes to those who talk 
much and work little, and he has found that it is more 
profitable for him to attend to his own business. 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


165 


Whatever, again, tends to improve the sanitary con¬ 
dition of a locality is most important to the working 
man who resides there. Great power is now vested in 
the hands of municipal bodies and local authorities for 
the furtherance of this desirable object; and it ought 
to be exercised firmly and vigilantly. Many a cellar, 
consisting of a single room, without any outlet behind 
—damp, dark, unventilated, uncheered by sunlight or 
fresh air, and more unhealthy than a gentleman’s pig¬ 
sty—is inhabited by a whole family of parents and 
children.* Such dust and dirt holes ought at once to 
be closed. Besides, in our large towns there is a vast 
number of small houses in dingy courts, built back 
to back, without any thorough ventilation, which are 
scarcely superior as habitations to the cellar. To what 
extent compulsory enactments for the building of con¬ 
venient cottages would be consistent with our principles 
of political economy, we need not attempt accurately 
to define. That the unthrifty would indeed in any 
case huddle in numbers into rooms and buildings too 
confined for them, is more than likely. But beyond all 
doubt grave considerations of health and morals are 
bound up in this question of cottages for the poor. 
The death rate must necessarily be high where families 
are packed together like so many casks of Manx herrings; 

* [Although the Manchester Corporation has been for some 
time gradually closing these cellar dwellings, there were in 1864, 
from the police returns, nearly 4,000 still in use there, occupied 
by upwards of 12,000 persons.—1866.] 


166 


THE CHURCH AMONG 


and the missionary or moralist can make but small im¬ 
pression upon a class, where the early ideas of boys and 
girls, of young men and young women, are vitiated by 
their occupying the same sleeping apartment. 

Then, surely, it is most essential to the well-being of 
the working classes that our Legislature should revise 
the laws that relate to the sale of intoxicating drinks. 
We profess neither teetotalism nor any other ism; we 
are simply advocates of moderation and morality ; and 
we ask for no more than an impartial and a practical 
consideration of the subject. But can you reform a 
drunkard by law ? We pretend to no such thing : we 
may however remove from- him some of his tempta¬ 
tions. To open out facilities more and more for the 
indulgence of a vice is surely not the rational way to 
diminish it. But can the law in any case make a man 
good? It may make him very bad, we reply. We do 
not hesitate to say, that the enactments in our Statute 
Book relating to dram-shops, beer-houses, gin-palaces, 
casinoes, singing saloons, are most objectionable and 
irrational. We believe that half a century hence they 
will be looked back upon as we now regard those which 
sanctioned bull-baiting and other brutalities. The 
Act that authorised the beer-house was one for inocu¬ 
lating the nation with a moral plague: in country 
places, it is the receptacle for the most dreaded and 
troublesome characters, such as poachers, tramps, and 
thieves in a peaceable neighbourhood; in manufacturing 
towns it is nothing better than a resort for pickpockets and 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


167 


a legalised brothel.* The Sunday evening music rooms, 
which the law seems to sanction, are a fitting prepara¬ 
tion for these dens of iniquity. The doors of such 
places are open to all, and but little check or control 
appears to be exercised over them by the police. Then, 
surely, the gin-shop ought to be subjected to a stricter 
regulation and a closer supervision. That the inn 
should be open to the traveller during certain hours of 
the Sunday, we admit; but why allow the gin-palace 
for the greater part of the day to hold out its flaunting 
allurements, where the sot enters, not to sit down and 
refresh himself, but to drink and stand, often as long as 
he can do so ? It is easy enough to write about the 
liberty of the subject in a leading article; but we should 
be well pleased to bring a contemplative editor from his 
study and place him at the door of a gin-shop on the 
Sunday in any of our manufacturing towns, and bid him 
watch the wretched creatures that pass in and out, un¬ 
washed, barely clad, the very lowest in the scale of human 
beings, and then ask him how much of this liberty is 
worth the conservation. The liberty of the subject! 
Why, you would remove from view a beggar exhibiting 
his sores ; and will you permit these moral lepers to 
parade their loathsomeness around the door of a gin- 
palace on the Lord’s day ? The liberty of the subject! 
Why, what idiotcy to talk thus! You would bid the 


* [In 1863 there were in Manchester 1826 beer-houses alone: 
consider the aggregate of crime that, originates, and of evil that 
is committed, under their roofs in any one week!—1866.] 


168 


THE CHURCH AMONG 


poor organ-grinder move on, who is guilty of no ab¬ 
stract moral wrong. You cannot take a step in life, in 
whatever direction it be, but you are taught, if you 
have an intellect to learn, how national morality and 
individual wellbeing are fenced around and secured 
by the law. Then some screaming member of the 
House of Commons shrieks out—‘ One law for the rich, 
another for the poor ! ’ Our answer is simply this— 
We will have the same law for the rich man and the 
poor man: we point out certain evils which in some 
degree are capable of being mitigated: if you can 
point out similar evils elsewhere, even if they be in the 
most aristocratic club-house in the metropolis, let the 
same regulation be applied to the one case as to the 
other. 

How is it then, it may be asked, that nothing is done 
to remedy these evils—evils patent to all who have 
eyes to see—evils admitted by our very parliamentary 
committees? The reasons are twofold. First, the 
grasp of the drink-selling interest is too strong and te¬ 
nacious to permit any of its privileges to be sacrificed; 
it is too influential at election-times. When Colonel 
Wilson Patten succeeded in passing a Bill through 
Parliament for shortening the hours during which the 
gin-palaces and such like places might be open on the 
Sunday, that Act—and never was deeper disgrace 
entailed on our legislators and legislation itself—was 
rescinded during the same session, from the pressure 
of that powerful body which is interested in the sale 
of intoxicating liquors. It is not however that all 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


169 


keepers of spirit vaults wish their houses to be open 
on Sunday: we have spoken with several who would 
gladly close them on that day; but they cannot, because 
there is no general law to compel all to do so. Secondly, 
among those of the public who desire a reform, there 
is no unity of purpose. Some are wild teetotallers— 
temperate in drink, intemperate in words; some are 
members of the United Kingdom Alliance, advocating 
projects utterly unattainable, and irrational if they 
could be attained; some are Sabbatarians, carrying 
their views to an unwise and impracticable extreme; 
some shout after one visionary measure, others after 
another; and so nothing is done— e nihilo nihil Jit. 
But is it not possible to raise some platform of action 
on which all moderate and moral men might take their 
stand? We advocate no Utopian schemes ; we would 
not aim at too high a mark at first; we would seek to 
restrain gradually the evils which now are acquiring 
more and more license; we recommend simply the 
attempt which is feasible. Oh that we had some 
earnest, sensible man, who had a belief in the efficacy 
of moral legislation and a love for God’s truth, to take 
up the question! What a monument —are perennius 

_might he leave behind him—not of words, words, 

words, but of real, genuine, practical service to his 
country and countrymen ! Surely the House of Com¬ 
mons could supply many such energetic, eloquent, 
moderate members, who might take up in a practical 
spirit those subjects which concern the temptations as 
well as the recreations and amusements of our people. 


170 


THE CHURCH AMONG 


No doubt it is more popular to agitate the question of a 
reformed franchise and a manhood suffrage, or to stand 
up for British interests at the Antipodes, than to talk 
about the control of a beer-shop or restrictions on a 
gin-palace. No doubt the revenue might suffer some¬ 
what from a reform of these matters ; but if ever phi¬ 
lanthropist did service to his fellow-men, he assuredly 
might do so, who took up this question like a man who 
had faith in the right, and who pursued his object with 
a manly determination combined with sound judgment 
and practical common sense. 

And while legislative bodies are devising plans, let not 
individuals forget their duty as men, and brothers, and 
Christians. ‘ The fault of the clergy !’ ‘ Where are the 
clergy ?’ How glibly do such expressions come from 
the lips even of men who, by precept and example, are 
undoing all that the clergy are attempting to do! There 
is not a grovelling penny-a-liner who cannot, after 
rising in the morning with a drunken headache, inquire, 
on any exhibition of popular ignorance, 1 Where are 
the clergy ?’ There is not a mob-mouther, as he mounts 
his tub after thrashing his wife and starving his children, 
who cannot ask, ‘What is the use of the clergy?’ There 
is not a graceless upstart member of ‘ the House’ who 
cannot, after leaving his heartlessfrivolities, exclaim with 
well-feigned astonishment on any appropriate occasion, 

‘ What are the clergy doing ? ’ There is not a lazy, 
negligent manufacturer who cannot, after refusing his 
five-shilling piece to the national school, wonder in the 
midst of a tumult, ‘ What have the clergy been about?’ 


THE TALL CHIMNEYS. 


171 


The clergy have not done everything, it is true; but they 
have done much. Would you more ? Would you put 
down * strikes,’ and animosity between employers and 
employed? Would you enlighten the ignorant mind 
and soften the stubborn heart? Would you instil loy¬ 
alty into disaffected feelings? Would you sanctify the 
hearth of the poor by contentment, industry, and virtue ? 
Then join with the clergy ; in your individual capaci¬ 
ties, strive to do good ; so walk that you may be an ex¬ 
ample to those beneath you; endeavour, by the word 
spoken in season, to reclaim the erring; and, be assured, 
in your respective spheres, you will have more influence 
for good than the clergy can possibly exert. The Roman 
emperor could boast that he found his city brick, and 
left it marble. May God grant, that it may not be the 
eternal reproach of our age, that we found England’s 
greatness apparently 

Firm as the marble, grounded as the rock, 

and that we left it shifting as the sandhill, passing as a 
cloud ! 




A TREATISE ON H 


y. 


172 



Humbug ! The word rings oddly, we admit; separate 
the syllables, and it is pleasant neither in sound nor 
savour : and yet we have a weakness for the phrase. 

‘ Phrase call you it ?’ asks the red-faced corporal. * By 
this good day I will maintain the word with my sword, 
to be a soldier-iike word, and a word of exceeding good 
command, 1 Is it not the monarch of the vocabulary for 
expressive meaning ? Is it not the symbol of an enor¬ 
mous reality, a great fact in life? Unde derivaturl 
Whence is it derived ? Can its genealogical descent be 
traced from that refuge for philological destitutes, the 
Anglo-Saxon; or is it the coinage of some modern mint ? 
The word, we maintain, is of good lineage. We have 
an opaque recollection that its parent ovfiftvyiov is to 
be found in one of the choruses of Aristophanes; but 
we have not time to search it out. Only listen to Notes 
and Queries. We are there told, on the authority of 
Miller’s Fly Leaves , that it is a corruption of the word 
Hamburg, 1 During a period when war prevailed on 



A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


173 


the Continent, so many false reports and lying bulletins 
were fabricated at Hamburg, that at length, when any 
one would signify his disbelief of a statement, he would 
say, “ You had that from Hamburg ; ” and thus, “That 
is Hamburg,” or Humbug, became an expression of 
incredulity.’* Now who Mr Miller is, we do not know; 
but if we had him here, we would steep his Fly Leaves 
in vinegar, and stuff them down his throat, for reducing 
so valuable a word to such an ignoble origin : we would 
do so even if he were the immortal Joe himself. In the 
teeth of the Notes and Queries , we have a firm belief 
that the word has a good pedigree; we are confident 
that a term so expressive must have a gentlemanlike 
extraction. 

Surely a royal ancestry it owns, 

And mourns the loss of palaces and thrones.f 

Its paternity may be lost in remote antiquity; but 
we deny roundly that it is to be ranked with those 
phrases of modern invention, which are the fungi of 
fustian and cotton twist—of cog wheels and train oil— 
and which came in with billy rollers and spinning jennies. 

It was Mr. Ferrand, late M.P. for Knaresborough, who 
enunciated the universal proposition, that ‘the world 
was one mighty humbug.’ This is a bold assertion— 
daring and dashing as one of Lord Cardigan’s charges, 
and spoken like a crafty Yorkshireman. Many no 
doubt will ‘dispute his major;’ but come now, kind 
reader, in private confidence between you and us, is 


* Yol. VII. p. 631. 


f Hor., B. II., Ode iv., 15. 



174 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


there not a mighty deal of humbug in the world, not¬ 
withstanding? It penetrates and permeates everywhere, 
like the air we breathe. If nature abhors a vacuum, 
this subtle essence is ready to occupy any vacuity. It 
is all pervading. ‘ Love,’ says Sir Walter Scott, some¬ 
where— 

Love tunes in peace the shepherd’s reed; 

In war, he mounts the warrior’s steed; 

In halls, in gay attire is seen; 

• In hamlets, dances on the green : 

Love rules the court, the camp, the grove. 

We have a strong conviction that Sir Walter meant 
humbug. 

Some philosophers take a delight in tracing the 
natural history of a moral sentiment. Is there no 
gentleman of analytic mind to investigate the natural 
history of the idea expressed by this word. Humbug, 
we believe, is the offspring of civilization and refinement. 
‘We are all hypocrites,’ it was often said by the late 
Charles Kemble, 4 and the highest art is the greatest 
hypocrisy.’ Humbug is scarcely compatible with a 
rude and primitive state of society. We should not 
have found it among the ancient Britons as they roamed 
barelegged through their native forests, and munched 
their acorns in company with wild boars. We should 
not discover it in the New Zealander as he knocks down 
his foe, scalps him, and dines off his choice parts without 
ceremony. Nor shall we meet with it when men are 
really in earnest, even in a civilized age. There was no 
humbug about Nelson, as he hoisted his last signal, and 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


175 


laid the Victory alongside the Redoubtable. There was 
no humbug in ‘ the Duke,’ as he led his forces through 
many a hard-fought campaign. Would that the old 
man were yet alive ! There have been scenes of late 
near Sebastopol, in which this material was but a trifling 
ingredient.* ‘1 hope, Englishmen, you will fight well 
to-day,’ said the Marshal St, Arnaud, as he rode along 
our lines with Lord Raglan before the battle of Alma. 
‘Hope!’ came the ready response from the ranks—‘and 
sure ‘General, you know we will!’ ‘Hurrah, lads !’ a 
voice was heard to ring out amidst the din of perhaps the 
hardest Crimean conflict; ‘ hurrah, lads, we must win yet 
anyhow ; or what will the lasses in England say of us ? ’f 
‘ We think it very hard, sir, that having had all the work 
we should have none of the sport! ’ was the remonstrance 
of the crew of the Agamemnon to Admiral Lyons, when 
a rumour had reached them that they were not to go into 
action.| In such expressions there is no persiflage. 
There is no humbug in a Highlander’s charge; there 
is no humbug in a Lancaster gun or a Minie rifle. No ; 
humbug, in its highest development, is the child of 
luxury. It is mostly of aristrocratic, or cottonocratic, 
or some such other ocratic origin : it is cradled on a 
couch of down, and dandled by lady nurses; its chris¬ 
tening dinner is abundant in turtle, venison, and cham¬ 
pagne; it grows up under gilded ceilings; it walks in 
trim gardens and in gay attire ; it uses ‘ holiday and lady 

* [Written in 1855.—1866.] 

f Related by Lord Palmerston on moving the Army Estimates. 

j Speech of Mr. Layard, Times, Dec. 16, 1854. 


176 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


terms ’ when it begins to articulate ; it is sent in time 
to some genteel educational establishment; it peradven- 
ture goes through Oxford or Cambridge; and if repre¬ 
sented by one of the male species, most probably develops 
in the end into a man of high professional standing, 
or a member of Parliament, or a peer of this realm. 

But we have a philosophic subject in hand ; and we 
must needs treat it after a scholastic fashion. Let us 
then, according to the Aristotelic mode, look out for our 
definition. Humbug may be laid down to be ‘ a species 
of deceit, giving pleasure.’ ‘Humbugging!’ said a 
barrister on the northern circuit, who was a plain like¬ 
ness of a bull-dog, to a female witness, ‘and pray, ma’am, 
what do you mean by your “humbugging?” ’ ‘ Why, 

sir,’ was the reply, ‘if I was to say that you are a 
handsome man, I should be humbugging you.’ If, that 
is, she had insinuated into his private ear that he was a 
good-looking specimen of humanity, it would have been 
a species of deceit, giving pleasure. And adopting the' 
Stagyrite’s theory of moral sentiments, let us assume 
that there are three species of humbug—two extremes 
and a mean—namely, humbug that is useful, humbug 
that is harmless, and humbug that is hurtful.* 

1. First, then, there is a kind of humbug that is 

* We need not inform the scholastic reader that, according to 
Aristotle’s system of morals, each particular virtue is a mean 
between two vices : r) p.*v vicepfUoXr] apLapTaverai, Kal 77 cA Aeiif/is 
if/eyerai • rb 8e /xecrov eirawenai Kal KaropQovroa * jwecrdrTjj ns &pa 
earIv 77 aperr], (Ttoxcuttik}) ov<ra rod p.eaov. 

Nicom. Eth . B.K. ch. 6. 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG . 


177 


useful. Are you startled at this assertion ? It is true, 
nevertheless. Just step into Exeter Hall, and see what 
is going on there. It is the month of May, and there is 
a crowded meeting within the walls in aid of one of our 
Home Missions. Listen: The Rev. Mealy Mincetext is 
on his legs, and addressing that large assembly. He is 
detailing his parochial experiences, as the Yicar of 
Hardansharpham. At this particular juncture he is 
giving an account of the manner in which he induced a 
widow and six children to attend his church. He 
describes the widow as having seen better days, and the 
children as pretty little dears, but left somewhat in a 
state of nature. He goes into detail so far as to par¬ 
ticularise a patch on one of the boys’ breeches. He 
recites the dialogue between himself and the widow in 
extenso , emphasizing his strong points; till at length, 
when he reaches his climax, and one of the little girls 
exclaims, ‘ Mammy, let us go to church,’ white hand¬ 
kerchiefs and delicate bosoms begin to flutter, and 
subdued sobs are audible throughout the assembly. 
Now the Rev. Mealy Mincetext is a good man and a 
faithful pastor; but we think he might bring up with 
him, some two hundred miles from Hardansharpham, 
certain parochial statistics more of a measure with the 
human intellect. To us his matter and manner are 
equally humbug; but Mealy is acquainted with his 
audience, and the effect of a claptrap ; he knows very 
well that he will get more money for the cause, and 
cheering for himself, by sending round the widow and 
her six children with their begging boxes, than if he 

VOL. r. » 


178 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


had appealed to the highest motives that can influence 
our nature. 

Another day we enter the same building, and we find 
that the proceedings of a great Missionary meeting are 
going on. Do not suppose that we agree in the saying 
of the celebrated Mr. Anthony Weller, that ‘the little 
niggers are little humbugs.’ We entertain no such 
sentiment; we are zealous advocates of both Home and 
Foreign Missions, and if need be we can tolerate a little 
plausibility’ in the mode of urging their claims. But be 
still. A gentleman with an Irish accent is speaking. 
He has just returned from Hooluchoo. A capital fellow 
he is—‘a broth of a boy’—brisk as a bee when he pleases, 
and sedate as one of his Hindoo crosslegged idols, when 
it is convenient. He has the ladies laughing, and he 
has them crying, and he has them both at once. And 
yet if you analyse what the Rev. Denis O’Flaherty is 
saying, you will find that it is little better than moon¬ 
shine. It is some trivial dialogue between himself and 
an old woman who had the reputation of a witch at 
Hooluchoo. We sometimes think that these gentlemen 
who carry about with them ‘ the interesting information,’ 
might as well leave it behind them: but in the main 
doubtless they are right; they administer a gentle dose 
of humbug, and it serves as a cathartic to the pockets of 
the people. 

Is there never, again, any little charlatanry among our 
popular preachers ? Is it all sterling talent that attracts ? 
or is there sometimes an admixture, a trifling admixture, 
of that grosser material of which we are treating ? Is 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


179 


there nothing in the shape of affectation; no promulga¬ 
tion of strong opinions for effect; no assumption of 
peculiar sanctity for the very atmosphere of the build¬ 
ing where the orator is delectating his audience, as 
though 

The airs of Paradise did fan the place ? 

Well, never mind ; all’s well that ends well; his little 
peculiarities, from whatever motive they spring, do good; 
they bring those to public worship who might otherwise' 
have stayed at home balancing their accounts or nursing 
the children; and will not each, paterfamilias, after at¬ 
tending his church, eat his Sunday’s dinner ‘ a wiser 
and a better man ?’ 

And do we not sometimes hear of eminent men having 
to pass through a kind of catechetical ordeal, in which, 
with a sort of dubious sincerity, they have to return the 
answer, Nolo episcopari ? This reply might seem at 
first sight to have a mild flavour of humbug about it; 
but then it is all for good. A plain reverend becomes a 
right reverend, a commoner is elevated to the rank of a 
spiritual peer; in short, an excellent man, no doubt, is 
made a bishop; and as for the willingness or unwilling¬ 
ness,—why, is not nolo all the same as volo , just as you 
exercise the privilege of a slight mental reservation, and 
use the word in a non-natural sense ? 

Then, what are we to think of those numberless 
associations that spring up like mushrooms on every 
side T We have secular education schemes, and religious 
education schemes; we have societies formed for the 
n 2 


180 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


education of the people after every conceivable fashion ; 
we have institutions for the advancement of sanitary 
reform; we have projects for free libraries, and for 
travelling libraries—for diffusing knowledge in me¬ 
chanics’ institutes, and on cart-wheels; we have plans 
for the establishment of model lodging-houseg; we have 
here a company formed for the supply of patent muffins 
and crumpets at reduced prices, there another for wet- 
nursing infants after an improved manner, and a third 
for supplying Epsom salts and castor-oil at a nominal 
charge; we hear of one association for sending out 
nurses to the East, and we expect to hear soon of a 
second for the establishment of Lying-in Hospitals 
among the Hottentots, and a third for deodorising the 
skins of the blacks. Now, all these schemes are very 
good; their objects are capital, and the effects they 
produce often not amiss. But are the promoters never 
actuated by any other motive than the single one put 
forward ? Oh, fie for shame, sir, to whisper such a 
question ! Well—say what you will—we have a 
lurking suspicion that some of those gentlemen who, 
in technical phrase, are so much ‘before the public,’ 
have pleasing visions of place and power in the back¬ 
ground. Look at that clergyman, who is apparently so 
much in earnest; and if you examine him narrowly, 
you will have reason to suppose that there is a bishopric, 
or a deanery, or a canonry, reflected on the retina of his 
glistening eye. When pamphlets full of benevolent 
projects begin to fall upon us, thick as the leaves in that 
much-quoted valley, do not profane men ask with a 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


181 


chuckle, ‘ What high clerical dignitary is in extremis ? ’ 
That layman, again, who is so anxious to carry out his 
project for the diffusion of universal brotherhood, may 
achieve 500/. a-year as secretary to the association. 
Some men rejoice to promulgate their theories in the 
public press; others to see their names on placards in 
capital letters, three inches long; F.R.S.es deliver lec¬ 
tures ; and very reverends are advertised to ‘address 
the meeting.’ One gentleman of original genius has 
written four pamphlets, in which he has solved many 
abstruse problems by a string of interminable statistics, 
and travelled to Massachusetts and back for proofs and 
illustrations. Well, success to your projects, say we; 
and while you are lending a helping hand to the poor 
around you, we do not begrudge you a lift for your¬ 
selves. 

2. But we believe the harmless humbug to be spread 
over a much wider surface in the economy of daily 
life, even than the useful commodity. Where can we 
turn without meeting with it ? It is needful to our 
very existence; it greases, as it were, the wheels of 
society, and makes every axle, and lever, and cog¬ 
wheel, work as smoothly as a well-oiled piston rod. 
Step into this court of justice. What do you see ? A 
grave-looking gentleman in robes, before whom are 
some twenty outlandish creatures in wigs. Well, is 
there aught wrong in that ? Not in the least: if the 
wisdom lies in the wig, let them wear their head-dresses 
for ever; only it seems to us a very innocent species of 
humbug. Then, let us listen to the speaker : how he 


182 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


repeats the expression, 1 my learned friend ! ’ Now, it 
is very well known that the person of whom he speaks 
is a great blockhead, and that, so far from being friends, 
the two have much the same feeling towards each other 
as they would have towards Miss Dinah’s 1 cold pison.’ 
But so far from blaming, we highly commend Mr. 
Serjeant Bloater for his smooth words. Then, how he 
smiles upon the jury ! How he addresses them as men of 
high character and clear judgment, all the while believ¬ 
ing them to be so many noodles ! And why not, pray ? 
If every man told his neighbour what he really thought 
of him, the world would soon be the arena of a pretty 
general conflict, equalled only by that of the Kilkenny 
cats. 

But let us enter a still more august assembly—that 
which is said to embody the collective wisdom of the 
nation. Mr. Punch, forsooth, has said that to 1 take 
the sense of the house,’ was to take the smallest homoe¬ 
opathic dose ever prescribed ; but Mr. Punch is an ill- 
natured humpback, and nobody believes him. Surely, 
though, there is no humbug among men who constitute 
the great Legislative Council of the nation ? Surely 
our fellow-subjects who are chosen from the common 
herd of mankind to make laws for the three kingdoms, 
must stand out conspicuously from the mass, by their 
exalted talents and straightforward bearing ? 

Let us then begin with the beginning. Let us see 
how members of Parliament are manufactured. Let us 
pay a visit to the ancient borough of Fudlycumpipes. 
It is election time, and several candidates are in the 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


183 


field. The two principal aspirants are Ebenezer Gin- 
gerton, Esq., of Gingerton House, and Sir Grumbleton 
Growler, of Oxenholme Manor. Gingerton was bap¬ 
tized Ebenezer against his will; it is traditionally 
reported that he kicked on the occasion; he has no 
respect for the memory of his godfathers and god¬ 
mothers ; but his father, who was a handloom weaver 
to begin with, and a class leader among the Methodists, 
delighted in the name. Old Gingerton, however, got 
on in the world, and died leaving behind him several 
thousands a year in bricks and mortar and machinery. 
Young Gingerton aspires to represent the borough of 
Fudlycumpipes in the Liberal interest. Sir Grumbleton 
Growler is an agriculturist of ancient family, who, on 
true Tory principles, regards all change as but a step 
nearer to the brink of destruction. He resides within 
a short distance from Fudlycumpipes, and from his 
great influence there he is pretty sure of being returned. 
Gingerton, who is not quite so safe, makes desperate 
play. He coaxes the ladies, like a knowing fellow; 
he promises the wives of the ten-pound householders 
that he will bring in a bill whereby their husbands 
may have plenty to eat and drink, and little to do, their 
pretty daughters may get smart husbands, and their 
children may have brandy balls, Ormskirk ginger¬ 
bread, and Everton toffy for nothing; he buys up, by 
his agents, all the old freemen that are purchaseable at 
hi. a-head; he harangues at meetings over pots of beer, 
and 'on the hustings, about purity of election, vote by 
ballot, free trade, liberal measures, Englishmen’s birth- 


184 


A TREATISE OR HUMBUG. 


right, universal brotherhood of nations, and halcyon 
days of peace without end ; he speaks of the operative 
as England’s stay and England’s glory —grande decus 
columenque rerum ; he is ‘ free to confess ’ that some of 
his projects for the good of the poor are encompassed 
with difficulties—nay, seem to interfere with the laws 
of Providence and political economy, but his love for 
his fellow creatures expands beyond ordinary limits; 
he then dashes out into statistics, quotes from the Re¬ 
ports of Gaol Chaplains and the Returns of Poor-law 
Unions, ransacks the books of the Registrar-General, 
and draws certain conclusions on the average duration 
of human life; he next rushes away to central Africa 
for illustrative topics, and at length finds himself in the 
moon—in all of which excursions he trusts that he is 
‘ germane to the matter in hand; ’ he has a pleasant 
smile for the facetious parts of his address, and a fine 
cambric handkerchief for the affecting; and after 
practising every species of chicanery, deceit, and hum¬ 
bug, Ebenezer Ginger ton, Esq., of Gingerton House, 
is returned, together with Sir Grumbleton Growler, 
of Oxenholme Manor, as a representative of the an¬ 
cient, loyal and incorruptible borough of Fudlycum- 
pipes. 

And now listen to Gingerton in the House of Com¬ 
mons. He possesses all that modest assurance which, 
notwithstanding the Demosthenic dictum, is the first, 
second, and third constituent of popular oratory ; and, 
on the whole, he speaks respectably as times go. As 
chairman he is bringing up the report of a committee 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


185 


on an election petition. The member petitioned against 
has been unseated on the ground of treating and bribery. 
Hear Gingerton, how he enlarges on the demoralization 
of a constituency by such unconstitutional and disgrace¬ 
ful practices, and on the necessity of repressing them 
by the strong hand of the law! Listen to the re¬ 
sponsive cheers of the House, as though every ‘ hear, 
hear,’ came from' a heart as guileless as an infant’s, 
while probably the pockets of nine-tenths of the assem¬ 
bly would utter but a hollow wail on the question if they 
could speak. We remember, a few sessions ago, Mr. 
Reynolds, M.P. for Dublin, pronounced something or 
somebody to be a humbug, when a member rose hastily 
and appealed to the Speaker whether he had not used 
‘ an unparliamentary phrase.’* Was it on the principle 
that the nearer the truth the more unbecoming the 
expression ? A rough, unmannerly fellow, about two 
hundred years ago, pronounced the gold mace you see 
there on the table to be the emblem of humbug. But 
come along, for we catch a distant glance of the Ser- 
jeant-at-Arms, who is looking undeniably ugly and 
suspicious. 

May we venture to slip into the more august assem¬ 
bly of our hereditary legislators hard by ? How decorous 

* ‘ He (Mr. Reynolds) stood there to impeach what, without 
meaning any personal offence to anyone, he must term an annual 
humbug’ (laughter). 

‘ Mr. Stamford rose to order: The honourable member for 
Dublin had used an unparliamentary phrase’ (laughter ).—Morning 
Chronicle , June 22, 1850. 


186 


'A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 



are the whole proceedings in this magnificent hall! No 
humbug here, you say. Well, there is probably a little 
of the innocent species, notwithstanding. You remember 
those malicious lines— 

And here and there some stern old patriot stood, 

Who could not get the place for which he sued. 

We have a firm conviction that this species of the patriot 
is extinct, if he was not from the beginning purely an 
imaginary character; at least, you cannot detect him here 
this evening. So far really as we can perceive, these 
Peers of England are only very ordinary-looking mortals 
after all; they are no doubt the porcelain clay of 
humanity, so far as their parents had to do with the 
moulding and pottery ; but positively many of them, in 
their external arrangements, might have been got up at 
a small expense in Monmouth Street. See, one ancient 
Peer rises with a bundle of papers in his hand. It is 
Lord Fumblebudget. He has spent more than a quarter 
of a century in the service of his sovereign, though we 
doubt whether he is now in office. He is said to be a 
man of great capacity and profound thought; but you 
will have to find that out for yourself. It is no 
easy matter to make out the purport of his speech; 
he fumbles with his papers; he corrects and recor¬ 
rects his expressions; for one step forward in his ad¬ 
dress, he often seems to be driven two back, like a 
vessel beating against adverse winds; and it would re¬ 
quire a professional reporter to disentangle his elocu¬ 
tionary knots. You cannot say, at all events, that there 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


187 


is any humbug about my Lord Fumblebudget. Well, 
the humbug that attaches to him is certainly of a very 
innocent character. If he is really no longer one of Her 
Majesty’s ministers, we strongly suspect that, in his 
amiable retirement, he is ‘ the right man in the right 
place.’ Would that our public offices were as satis¬ 
factorily filled ! Among the thousand and one placemen 
in our land, there may perhaps be found here and there 
a worse style of humbug than that of my Lord Fumble¬ 
budget. 

But let us leave the Peers of this realm, spiritual and 
temporal, to their deliberations; let us descend to the 
more commonplace aspects of life. My lords have to 
make laws; ordinary mortals have to make a living. 
And what clever schemes will men devise for the laudable 
object of getting on in the world! ‘It is quite impossible,’ 
we heard a large tradesman say not long ago, ‘ it is quite 
impossible to get on now-a-days by plain dealing.’ 
‘Without, that is,’ we added, ‘a dash of humbug.’ 

‘ Precisely so,’ was the reply. To be sure of this, you 
have only to cast your eye over the advertisements in 
any leading journal; and you may depend upon it, that 
the columns which contain them are the mirrors of 
domestic life. The parliamentary reports reflect the 
sense or the nonsense of certain long-winded chatterers, 
but give us the advertisements for reflecting the indoor 
life of our country. Who, as he reads them, is not 
amazed at the inventive faculties of our people, and 
impressed with admiration at the benevolent objects 
towards which their skill is directed ! Mrs. Johnson 



188 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


comes forward with her ‘ Soothing Syrup, a real blessing 
to wives and mothers; ’ the 1 Reversible Paletot’ and 
the * Magic Razor Strop ’ are intended to administer to 
your comfort. Are you bilious ? Send at once for a box 
of Mr. Cockle’s pills, which are so extensively patron¬ 
ized. Are you suffering from toothache ? Be thank¬ 
ful for ‘ Tomkins’s Succedaneum.’ ‘Parr’s Life Pills’ 
are within the reach of those who wish to live for ever; 
the ‘ Revalenta Arabica’ is warranted to cure dyspepsia 
and to strengthen delicate digestions. Have you a 
weakness for luxuriant whiskers? Miss Emily Dean 
steps forward with her ‘ Crinalene.’ Is your hair of a 
grey, or a sandy, or a fiery, or an indescribable hue ? 
You have only to purchase a bottle of the ‘ Liquid Hair 
Dye.’ Do we not read also of female professors who 
make a living by enamelling ladies’ faces ? Do you want 
a wife ? Go to the ‘ Matrimonial Alliance Institution.’ 
For the never-failing success of these specifics we cer¬ 
tainly cannot make ourselves responsible ; but if there 
is something of humbug about them, it is of that kind 
which may possibly do some good, and cannot do any 
great harm. 

Our national amusements, again, are most of them 
innocent enough; but looking at them philosophically 
—and this is a philosophical treatise—they involve a 
considerable mixture of humbug. Reduce them to 
their abstract proportions, and they seem at the best 
but specimens of ‘ admirable fooling.’ Our national 
sport of hunting—what is it ? Some fifty human beings 
are galloping after some fifty dogs, and both are in 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


189 


pursuit of a creature, the highest property of which is 
that its tail may be turned into a dusting brush. But 
it is a healthy amusement, you cannot deny. ‘Well, 
they may call this a health-giving pursuit, if they like,’ 
exclaims the man who is up to the middle in a brook, 
and emptying the water out of his hat; ‘ but give me 
roach-fishing in a punt.’* How can you regard angling 
but as a simpleton watching a float or an artificial fly ? 
When Dr. Johnson described it as a rod and line with a 
fool at one end and a worm at the other, we admit that 
the surly fellow was a trifle too severe. What is cricket 
but twenty-two full grown men in flannel-jackets, 
banging a lump of leather w r ith a piece of wood ? Then 
as to boating—we have had the rashness ourselves to 
pull No. 4 in an Oxford racing boat in our hot-blooded 
youth, when William the Fourth was king; but that a 
rational being should read the ‘ Nicomachean Ethics ’ in 
the morning, and in the evening run the risk of break¬ 
ing a blood-vessel, by merely endeavouring to shove a 
piece of wood in the shape of a boat before another piece 
of hollow timber, has been a marvel to us from that day 
to this. Dancing, again—‘ Now sir, not a word against 
dancing, if you please,’ we hear a young lady exclaiming. 
Well, if ever there was a ridiculous operation for a 
creature with an intellect above that of a monkey it is 
the process of twisting round the body, and poking out 
the legs, and sprawling out the feet, to the squeaking of 
some vile instrument. What is the motive? Cui bono ? 


* See Punch's Almanack, 1855, December. 


190 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


The Dancing Dervishes and the American Shakers have 
a religious object in their whirling motions, and we can 
understand what they mean. But for grown up men 
and women, in the nineteenth century, to spend their 
time till daybreak in shaking down their garters to the 
tune of a fiddle, seems to us the most inexplicable hum¬ 
bug that the wildest imagination can devise or conceive. 
Watch them through an aperture, and stop your ears to 
the music, and can you keep from laughing ? 

Spectatum admissi, risum teneatis, amici ? * 

Among our national professions we should select the 
medical gentleman as a fair illustration of the innocent 
species of humbug. Your lawyer is little better than a 
savage; he has to do cruel things, and he goes through 
his work with the insensibility of a cannibal; he is one 
of the ‘ anthropophagi that do men eat.’ But your doctor 
is a gentle spirit: he walks delicately. With what 
sensibility of touch and courtesy of manner does he lay 
his finger on the pulse of that sickly lady ! How sa¬ 
gacious he looks all the while ! ‘ Who ever really was 

as wise as he looks ? ’ it may be asked of him, as it was 
of Lord Thurlow; and yet we will be bold to assert that 
he understands as much about that lady’s complaint as he 
does about the digestive organs of the man in the moon. 

But passing from professions to persons, we are bewil¬ 
dered with the various shapes and aspects in which this 
Proteus appears. We find it everywhere; turn where 


* Hor., ArsPoct. line 5. 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


191 


we may we meet it; we have a firm belief that the bond 
fide traveller, if ever he can be discovered, will only 
prove a humbug. Look at those two tali men swinging 
behind that carriage, with their powdered heads and 
precise calves. They are doubtless got up at great 
expense, and with much care; but what are all their 
trimmings and calf-stuffings but instances of harmless 
humbug ? Then observe that elegant young lady who 
is stepping out of the carriage. You are not surely 
going to charge so fawnlike a creature with practising 
any deception ? Come, then, let us strip her—so far, 
that is, as is proper for scientific investigation. Well, 
did you ever ? Mark to what miserable proportions she 
is reduced. Alas ! when disrobed of what the poet calls 
These troublesome disguises which we wear, 
she is found to have been a mere make-up of stuffing. Is 
it not a sad thing to discover that a considerable moiety 
of such a graceful creature has been manufactured in 
Regent Street ? She is like one of those Eastern birds, 
which in full plumage are rich in their colours and 
graceful in their proportions, but when stripped of 
their feathers are reduced to a miserable framework of 
skin and bone. Is there not a portion of a lady’s dress 
called back-gammon ? What is this but another name 
for humbug on the obverse side of the human medal ? 

1 O these ladies’ dresses! ’ we said to a silk mercer 
the other day : 1 Is not this foolish fashion of dressing in 
balloons going out? ’ ‘ Going out, sir ! ’ was his reply, as 
he rubbed his hands gleefully, ‘ going further out every 
month—ha ! ha ! ha ! going further out every month.’ 


192 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


We always had a strong liking for Dugald Dalgetty, 
solely and simply because there was no humbug about 
him, or, if any, of a very innocent kind. The man who 
looked after his pay and pro van t, not caring who laughed 
—the man who had a filial longing for his ancestral lands 
of Drumthwacket—the man who showed himself to be 
merciful, inasmuch as he cared for his beast—the man 
who could make himself comfortable anywhere, turning 
even the angles in the dungeon at Inverary Castle into 
an imaginary elbow chair—the man who would not 
break his military sacramentum even in view of the 
gibbet—that man, depend upon it, was one among ten 
thousand for straightforwardness and a practical sense 
of duty. The charge of selfishness is brought against 
Dugald by an eminent reviewer.* Selfishness !—And 
who is not selfish ? Had the Montroses and Monteiths 
no eye to self? It might not be that they cared so 
much for pay and provant, or looked with an envious 
eye on the barren lands of Drumthwacket; but were 
they not shooting their arrows at far higher game ? 
Were they not leading on their bare-legged vassals to be 
shot like dogs at midsummer, while they would reap the 
reward? Why did not some unselfish soldado of the 
party undertake the embassay to Inverary Castle? No ; 
the only difference between Dugald and his fellow- 
cavaliers was, that he was selfish according to nature— 
secundum naturam , as they would have said at the 
Marischal College of Aberdeen—and cared not who 


See Preface to the Legend of Montrose. 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


193 


knew it; and that they were selfish according to con¬ 
ventionalism, and endeavoured to hide the cloven foot 
under the flaunting drapery of martial honour. 

But, alas ! we fear after all that Dalgetty was only 
an imaginary character. It is painful to be brought 
to this admission; but as the Stagyrite loved truth 
better than he loved his brother philosopher Plato, so 
must we postpone Sir Dugald to matter of fact.* The 
Soldado was manifestly a fancy picture : we do not 
find his counterpart in rerum natura. As Shakspeare 
in his dreamy visions portrayed his Ariels and his 
Oberons, so Sir Walter in his most imaginative mood 
sketched his Dugald Dalgetty. 

Well, but look the truth fairly in the face; is not a 
dash of innocent humbug a sort of sugar-candy to the 
coffee of life ? We are not now talking in a gown and 
bands, neither are we on the stage at Exeter Hall by 
the side of Mealy Mincetext; but we are applying the 
touchstone of philosophy to the incidents of every-day 
life. What is freemasonry but a humbug ? And yet 
who ever heard of a freemason who was not delighted 
with his square and compasses after he had got over his 
initiative scarification? Our wives and families are 
humbugged every day, and yet what can be more 
agreeable than their delusions as they submit to the 
shampooing process ? Mark that smiling shopman 
behind the counter as he is expanding his wares before 
the Countess of Cornucopia. His engaging manners 

* ’A ntyoiv yap 6vtoiv (pi\oiv, flaiov irpoTipav tt]v aX^Qeiav. — Eth. 
Nicom. I. 6. 


VOL. I. 


0 


194 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


are palpably emptying her ladyship’s purse; but both 
are pleased with the interview. It has been said— 

Surely tltfe pleasure is as great 
Of being cheated as to cheat. 

Therefore the lady and the shopman go shares in the 
enjoyment. And have we not showmen as well as 
shopmen exhibiting their wares from Greenwich Fair 
to the Italian Opera ? Are not caterers for public gul¬ 
libility scouring the earth in search of varieties ? One 
day a fiddler is introduced among us scraping his catgut 
to the tune of a guinea a minute: on another, some 
squealing foreigner warbling, as it is called, money out 
of the pockets of moonstruck simpletons, in a language 
of which they know no more than Hebrew: on another, 
some strong-legged jade 1 louping and flinging ’ like 
Burns’s ‘ Cuttie Sark,’ and in habiliments quite as scanty. 
Well,such exhibitions may not be altogether to our taste; 
but they keep our daughters from turning sulky, and 
our wives from delivering curtain lectures. We fear that 
what was said or sung of lotteries more than a century 
ago, may be said of many things besides in our day:— 
A lottery is a taxation 
Upon all the fools in the nation; 

And, heaven be praised, 

It is easily raised, 

Credulity’s always in fashion; 

For folly’s a fund 
Will never lose ground, 

While fools are so rife in the nation.* 

* The Lottery , by Henry Fielding, 1731. See Hone’s Every¬ 
day Book on Lotteries. 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


195 


3. We come now to that portion of our essay in 
which we have to treat of the hurtful species of humbug; 
and where can we find an apter illustration of it than in 
the notorious Phineas Taylor Barnum ? Who can 
contemplate this Napoleon of entrepreneurs without a 
sort of sublime amazement? As a professor of hum¬ 
bug he leaves the Wizard of the North with his 
inexhaustible bottle far behind : he glories too in his 
science. At a public dinner he proposes the toast, 
1 Success to Humbug !’ He lectures to agricultural 
labourers on 1 the Philosophy of Humbug.’ He in¬ 
habits a splendid mansion called Iranistan, which means, 
we imagine, Humbug Palace. He stares the public in 
the face, and, thrusting his tongue into his cheek, coolly 
says, ‘ Friend public, you are a mighty big simpleton.’ 
Was it of him that his countryman Longfellow wrote : 

He looks the whole world in the face, 

And fears not any man ? 

Clever men sometimes outwit themselves: so with 
Barnum. He has published an autobiography. 

0 Barnum, Phineas Taylor Barnum, 0! 

What could have induced so acute a man to do so 
foolish a thing? We have no objection to pay a shil¬ 
ling for the sight of a Feejee Mermaid or a Woolly 
Horse; but we choose to be left to our own fancy in 
the inspection; we love, as Wordsworth calls it— 

That modest charm of not too much— 

Part seen, imagined part. 

It is very true that he exhibited among us a. minikin, 
o 2 


196 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


of a few pounds’ weight, and carried away from our 
shores as many thousands as would build and endow a 
hospital or a cathedral; but if aristocratic ladies rushed 
forward with a maternal enthusiasm to kiss the wretch 
—Tom Thumb, not Barnum —it was their own look¬ 
out. The philosophy of the question however lies 
here. If a person afford us pleasure by imposture, why 
should he inflict pain by revealing to us the secret of it ? 
If we have enjoyed a supper of potted beef, we are 
somewhat .discomposed to find from a police report, the 
day after, that a dead horse, two flayed donkeys, and 
four skinless tom-cats have been lately found upon the 
premises of the man from whom we purchased it. It 
is no consolation whatever to reflect with Mr. Weller 
that ‘ it is the seasoning as does it.’ We condemn 
without any reservation the dealer in preserved meats. 
But it is somewhat worse with Barnum. He has not 
been detected by a police officer in fraudulent dealings; 
he publishes a hundred thousand copies of his own 
exulting confessions. And when he ventures to inform 
us that he carries a Bible in his coat-pocket or carpet¬ 
bag, and studies it too, while he is itinerating with his 
Washington’s Nurse, or his Mermaid, we are inclined 
to give Phineas up as an incurable. 

But is Barnum alone in this autobiographical tom¬ 
foolery ? Alas! since that mad Frenchman wrote his 
4 Confessions,’ the world has been sadly pestered with 
these vanities. How this should be is a mystery to us, 
on the supposition that the autobiographers are of sound 
mind. If men do not purpose deliberately and fully to 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


197 


write themselves down asses, why attempt this dan¬ 
gerous style of composition ? Gloss over your own 
character, and you are a lying humbug : lay bare your 
failings, and you are a shameless humbug. And yet— 
sad it is to relate it—living men publish octavo volumes 
full of twaddle about themselves and their acquaintance. 
Is there no law against this ? Can members of a civilized 
community be permitted to exhibit themselves and their 
friends like so many gibbeted murderers, at the meeting 
of four roads, and escape without being indicted at law ? 
Will not the statute of lunacy reach the case ? Have 
such gentlemen no relatives to take care of them ? Not 
that autobiographers who leave their writings as post-obits 
are much better. True, they have not to look the living 
in the face ; and so far well: but why should not exe¬ 
cutors prove a dead man’s friend, and burn what he has 
written about himself? We always regarded the poet 
Moore with deference and respect till, in an unlucky 
hour, we read his autobiography. Then, for goodness’ 
sake, do not throw open the saloons of great houses with 
traditional associations, and exhibit the inmates in their 
every-day costume and character. When we hear that 
these marvellous places have been the nurseries of poli¬ 
ticians who sucked in statesmanship with their mother’s 
milk—that they have been the hotbeds of philosophical 
sayings—that they have hatched poets like chickens by 
this new steam invention—we are like men looking at 
the sun through a slight haze; and though we know not 
exactly how much to believe, we regard such mansions 
with distant admiration. But let busybodies retail the 


198 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


conversations and gabble about the goings on there, and 
we find out at once that it is 1 distance ’ which ‘ lends en¬ 
chantment to the view.’ Giants are reduced to pigmies 
by a sudden process of pantomime; lions are transformed 
into very/ shallow monsters; ’ men who have signed proto¬ 
cols seem fitter for tying up brown paper parcels. Reader, 
are you writing your autobiography ? Do you contem¬ 
plate so rash an act ? Then, in the name of yourself 
and your friends and common sense, we pronounce you 
a humbug. You are to be shunned as dangerous. 
Fcenum habes in cornu. If we had our way with you, 
we would pack you off to Bedlam instanter without 
taking out a commission de lunatico inquirendo. 

Again, is Phineas Barnum the only Cheap John with 
defective wares ? No later than to-day we took off* our 
hat to Mr. Ezekiel Yarnspin—a man worth half a million 
if he is worth a penny. He sends goods over the wide 
world, and overstocks the markets at home. Well, where 
is the harm ? None whatever if the goods were genuine; 
but the faculties of man are exerted now-a-days to pro¬ 
duce the best-looking article at the smallest cost. The 
nineteenth century, viewed in the light of trade, is 
emphatically the century of devil’s dust. And yet Mr. 
Yarnspin walks on ’Change erect, and with an untroubled 
breast. Fine ladies are lamenting over his deceptive 
cambrics ; servant girls are bewailing the flying colours 
of his prints; porters are cursing his cracking fustians; 
mothers are mourning over his rotten calicoes; house¬ 
keepers are sorrowing over his fading druggets; from the 
court of the King of Dahomey to the court of Queen 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


199 


Victoria the cry of distress is heard; and yet we will 
answer for it that as we are now writing at midnight he 
is snoring soundly in the arms of Mrs. Ezekiel Yarnspin. 
What can you do with your conscience, Ezekiel ? Do 
you lock it up in your Milner’s patent anti-combustion 
box for safety during the week-days, and bring it out 
fresh as the carnation in your button-hole on Sunday, as 
you ‘ sit under ’ the Rev. Jonas Doldrum at Bethesda 
Chapel ? You will hardly listen to the moral prolusions 
of a heathen poet, or we would quote for your edification 
a few lines from the JEneid of Virgil: 

There Rhadamanthus sits in awful state ; 

Around him, fresh from earth, the culprits wait: 

He sifts each sham, though cunningly o’erlaid, 

And makes each wight confess the tricks of trade; 

Then o’er their heads the scorpion-rod he shakes, 

And brings it down like fury on their backs.* 

We have not much satisfaction in discussing this third 
division of our subject, but we cannot conceal from our¬ 
selves that the injurious species of humbug is multiform. 
It seems at intervals to invade our nation in the shape 
of some gigantic imposture. Sometimes it personates 
itself with the figure of a mammon idol; sometimes it 

* Gnosius haec Rhadamanthus habet durissima regna, 
Castigatque, auditque dolos; subigitque fateri, 

Quse quis apud superos, furto lsetatus inani, 

Distulit in seram commissa piacula mortem. 

Continuo sontes ultrix accincta flagello 
Tisiphone quatit insultans; torvosque sinistra 
'Intentans angues, vocat agmina sseva sororum. 

Virgil, Mneid : B. YI. 566. 


200 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


clothes itself in a strong intellectual delusion; sometimes 
it is enveloped in a blind superstition. Will anyone 
allow himself to wander back in memory some eight or 
nine years, and he will find himself breathing the malaria 
of a most fatal humbug ? It was the season of the railway 
miasma. Cheating, trickery, lying, were practised on an 
enormous scale, and held to be perfectly justifiable. 
‘ Foul ’ was ‘ fair.’ The very Spartan condition of con¬ 
cealment was eschewed. The moral sense of the country 
was debased ; its virtue was debauched. Provisional 
committees, scrip, engineers, rival lines—these were the 
only topics of discussion, turn where you might—at 
home and on ’Change, at dinner and in the drawing-room. 
Men of station and reputed integrity were accustomed to 
speak of jobs, frauds, deceit, as carelessly as they sipped 
their claret after dinner. The time was one of awful 
delinquency in the annals of our country ; and may it 
never return ! Last year delusion came over us under 
another aspect. Mesmerism, clairvoyance, spirit-rapping, 
table-turning—in short, all the humbug treated of by 
Joseph Ennemoser—seemed to invade us at once like a 
swarm of locusts. Education ! Professor Faraday, you 
may reasonably question its reality among us ; but you 
must not forget the great Samuel’s dictum, that you may 
supply reasoning, but not brains.* Neither have we 

* [What shall we say of the Davenport humbug in the year of 
grace, 1865? We do not blame the actors so much; they are 
but following their vocation. But is it not melancholy to reflect 
that many educated persons could have seen a spiritual agency 
in such a very stupid imposture ? In the treatment of the Bro- 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


201 


escaped the impostures that engender the most grovel¬ 
ling superstitions. Talk of the nineteenth century, 
forsooth—its enlightenment and progress ! Bah ! it is 
an age of humbug car’ i^o\r]v ; and it would be more 
satisfactory if we could say of it, as we say sometimes of 
our neighbours, that it was no one’s enemy but its own. 
Let a man give five hundred pounds for a couple of 
Cochin Chinas, and we do not quarrel with him on that 
score: we have a shrewd suspicion that he is a fool, 
and we let the matter rest there. But when ecclesiastics 
coin miracles and establish ‘ immaculate conceptions,’ 
we rub our eyes in amazement, like Rip van Winkle, 
and wonder whether we have not awoke in the dark 
ages.* 

thers we find the characteristics of London and Lancashire 
broadly typified. London gaped, stared, and partly believed; 
Lancashire mobbed the fellows at Manchester, and at Liverpool 
outdid them in their own tricks.—1866.] 

* We happened to be on a visit in the neighbourhood of 
Preston last year (1854), when a building, magnificent enough for 
a cathedral, was opened there for divine worship by the Romanists. 
We subjoin an extract from the sermon delivered on the occa¬ 
sion—delivered in the presence of most of the old Roman 
Catholic families in that division of the county. The preacher 
is showing how the erection of the edifice was first suggested. 
‘Many of them (his hearers),’ he says, ‘might have heard of a 
servant girl in this town (Preston) who lay dangerously ill, but 
who when apparently past all hope of recovery, had been mira¬ 
culously restored to her accustomed health, by being anointed by 
a priest who visited her with the oil of the blessed St. Walburga, 
and that, too, in a manner almost instantaneous. Struck with 
so signal a miracle, two priests had conferred together, when one 


202 


A TREATISE OR HUMBUG. 


We might find numberless individual personations of 
this species of humbug; but not to trespass too much on 
the reader’s patience, we will venture to lay it down 
as a general rule, that the man who is desirous of 
parading himself as better than his neighbours, is in 
nine cases out of ten a humbug, hypocritical and dan¬ 
gerous to society at large. Now a person may do this 
in two ways : he may adopt a brusque manner, and a 
blunt style of address, evermore depreciating others, 
and holding himself up as the only honest fellow in the 
neighbourhood ; or he may assume a snuffling, whining 
tone, affecting much humility, but never thinking it 
inconsistent to deliver a homily to those around him on 
their shortcomings and defections. 

We very well remember a specimen of the art under 
the rough-and-ready guise. He was a lawyer: he styled 
himself Honest John, till people believed him; he de¬ 
scribed himself by implication as the only straightforward 
lawyer in the county, till his clients took his bluntness 
for candour. But unluckily Honest John took a trip to 
America one year in the pleasant season of summer, and 
never returned. Like a crafty humbug, however, he 
went richly laden: he took with him in charge some 
forty thousand pounds of other people’s money. That 

of them proposed that they should evince their gratitude for such 
a mercy by raising subscriptions, to be devoted to the erection 
of a church, dedicated to the saint by whose instrumentality, 
under God, so striking a cure had been performed. Subscriptions 
were commenced, and the fruits of them were the edifice in 
which they were then assembled.’ 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG . 


203 


ancient again who, when met wandering through the 
city with a lantern in his hand, said that he was in 
search of an honest man, was an excellent type of this 
class. We venture to say that he would not have found 
the object of his search by turning the bull’s-eye upon 
himself. 

But we almost fancy that the very good man who is 
ever lecturing his betters in unctuous language and 
nasal cadences, is a more dangerous humbug still. We 
have here and there met with such an one in our time. 
Travelling together along the turnpike of life, he will 
cheat you out of the fourpenny toll, while he is enlarg¬ 
ing on your carnal-mindedness; and should you venture 
to suggest to him mildly, that he had better confine him¬ 
self to his own personal edification, he straightway stops 
your mouth by threatening to pray for you. Some months 
ago we were closeted with a Manchester merchant in his 
private office, when one of the principal salesmen knocked 
and stepped into the room. 

4 Well, Jackson,’ said the master, 4 has that buyer been 
able to satisfy himself about the goods ? ’ 

‘ It was just what I wanted to see you about, sir,’ was 
the answer. 

4 Well, Jackson, what’s to do ? ’ 

1 Why, sir, to tell the truth,’ said the salesman with 
a cunning look, 4 1 don’t half like my man. He has 
been lecturing me for the last ten minutes about my spi¬ 
ritual darkness though I never saw him before; he mixes 
up calicoes and Calvinism in the funniest way; besides, he 
snuffles through his nose fearfully, and declares that there 


204 


A TREATISE ON HUMBUG. 


is no true religion but among the Baptists. I don’t half 
like him, sir.’ 

‘ Any references ? 

‘ Snuffle, Shufflebotham, and Whine.’ 

‘ Well, what do they say ? 

‘ That he is truly spiritual.’ 

‘ Truly spiritual! the canting humbugs ! but is he 
truly substantial ? ’ 

‘ That’s more than I know, sir. What am I to do ? ’ 

‘Well, Jackson,’ said the master, musing, ‘it cer¬ 
tainly seems a doubtful case. Let me see. H’m! Trust 
him for 100/. at three months. Not a farthing more, 
remember—100/. at three months.’ 

Header, fare thee well for the present. We wish thee 
good-bye in the words of an ancient moralist. ‘ Lay the 
subject of this treatise to heart, if thou desirest to Succeed 
in the world. Ponder over it, if thou wishest well to 
thyself. Employ this pleasant unction we have analysed 
with discretion, and it will serve thee right faithfully 
unto the end. Do not daub it on like an unskilful 
painter, for thus thou shalt spoil thine own handiwork; 
but use thy colours moderately and tastefully. By what 
other means do our statesmen acquire distinction, our 
divines gain popularity, our lawyers attract clients, our 
physicians allure patients, our merchants and tradesmen 
amass riches, than by the judicious appliance of’—a 
little pleasing humbug ? 


205 


VI. 

A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


The world turns round bodily—so say our philosophers: 
no less true is it that it revolves morally and socially. 
Take the cycle of a century in our social state, and how 
marvellous is the revolution in all the habits, customs, 
and pastimes of our people ! Where are our May-poles 
and our Morris-dancers? Where are our mummings and 
our maskings ? Where are our wassails and our wakes ? 
Where are the 

Sports and pageantry and plays, 

That cheered our eves and holidays— 

of which Master Herrick sang ? They are for the most 
part dead and buried : if any remain, their passing bell 
is tolling. Sunlit skies have been hearsed in smoke ; 
May-poles have been superseded by tall chimneys; 
flower-garlands are no longer woven, but cotton twist; 
our ears are not now greeted with the carols of the lark 
at heaven’s gate, but with the whizzing of iron throstles; 
the language of poetry has been extruded by such terms 
as slubbing, roving, scutching, warping, and doubling. 



206 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


Deities that preside over Parnassus, shut your ears ! 
The days of romance, in good sooth, have gone by; the 
iron age of facts, whether for good or evil, is upon us. 

The last century has witnessed many revolutions. 
Thrones have been toppled over like nine-pins, and mo- 
narchs have been hustled off the stage like so many bad 
actors. But, so far as our country is concerned, the greatest 
revolutionists have been steam, machinery, and cotton. 
What wondrous changes have these mighty agents 
wrought among us ! Alas ! we know not how to address 
you, ye dread anarchs! Are ye benefactors of the human 
race, ye soulless, self-moving agents, or are ye the 
reverse? Ye have amassed gold into enormous glit¬ 
tering heaps for the few, but have ye blessed the many ? 
Ye have sucked into your frightful maelstrom the in¬ 
mates of many a rustic cottage who from infancy had 
breathed the pure air and gazed on the green fields; but 
have ye increased the aggregate of happiness among 
them ? Are ye three heavenly maidens scattering enjoy¬ 
ment, comfort, and plenty from your golden urns, or 
are ye the three weird sisters joining in the chorus,— 

Double, double, toil and trouble; 

Fire burn, and cauldron bubble ? 

On the whole, it is probable that the sum of human 
happiness is proportionately about the same now as ever. 
There is a self-adjustment in the mind as well as in 
the body of man. The whole constitution, mental and 
physical, adapts itself to fresh scenes and circumstances 
with a wonderful facility. May there not then be as 


A WHLTWEEK IN MANCHESTEB . 


207 


much happiness and enjoyment in an individual heart 
as it beats beneath a murky sky and to the tune of a 
steam loom, as in another that thumps in a purer at¬ 
mosphere to the jolting of a waggon, and the grunt of 
* Who-up, Dobbin ? ’ 

At any rate, if you doubt, reserve your judgment till 
you have perused my Diary. I have just visited that 
county of Goths and Vandals called Lancashire. I have 
had a week’s adventure among the wilds of Manchester. 
And why should I not chronicle my doings, darings, 
and sufferings ? Whether a man now-a-days casts his 
shoe over the hill of Balaklava, or makes the Hellespont 
his washpot—whether he pays a month’s visit to some 
Eastern monarch, or spends a few days at the ‘ diggings ’— 
whether he joins in an Arctic expedition, or domesticates 
for a time with the Mormons—whether he has been 
deer-stalking in the Highlands of Scotland, or following 
the brutal sport of slaughtering wild animals in Southern 
Africa—straightway parturiunt monies, and a book is 
born. And why, pray, should my adventures be re¬ 
garded as less perilous or interesting than those of more 
aspiring travellers ? Indeed, I half fancy that some of 
them have never wandered very far from their own 
writing-desks. Now I have visited the scenes described, 
and joined in the incidents related; I have not drawn 
upon my imagination for my facts. An old college friend 
of mine is a resident in Manchester ; he is a clergyman, 
passive and unrepining, who seems to have been born to 
inhale an oleaginous atmosphere, and to be kicked by 
cottonian autocrats. Having a desire to visit this rude 


208 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


locality once in my life-time, I wrote to him, inviting 
myself to his house for Whitweek. His reply was to 
this effect:—‘ Come, by all means, and stay as long as 
you please. But what do you expect ? Do you intend 
to lie a-bed till ten, and struggle up to breakfast at eleven, 
after your ancient Oxonian fashion? As you have chosen 
Whitweek for your visit, you must do at Rome as the 
Romans do, and I fear that you will only leave your 
laziness and luxuries for hard work and lenten fare. 
During that week the spindles are mostly standing in 
Manchester, and the heads are spinning instead. Come, 
however, if you dare.’ Accordingly I went, saw, and 
recorded. 

A Sunday School. 

Hail, smiling morn ! Bless your ruddy face ! And 
yet I would willingly have waited awhile for your 
amiable salutation. Seven o’clock ! Down to breakfast 
at half-past. 1 This week,’ said my friend, * is to our 
toiling, smoke-begrimed operatives what our holidays 
were in our school-boy years. It is the one sunny spot in 
their memory and in their prospect, amidst their dreary, 
mill-horse daily labour. You cannot conceive how anx¬ 
iously it is anticipated—how much preparation is made 
for it in caps and bonnets, in ribbons and dresses : you 
may take my word for it, that the aggregate consumption 
of sleep in Manchester was less last night than it has been 
for the same number of hours during the last twelve 
months, if there was only a somnometer to try it; and 
at this moment—don’t think me too poetical and enthu¬ 
siastic—there is many a young heart happy in its own 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


209 


elasticity, and in the prospect of a week with but little 
toil and care. But come along, and judge for yourself.’ 

We start out accordingly for my friend’s school, 
where the young people with their superintendents and 
teachers are assembling, preparatory to joining the 
general procession of Church Sunday scholars. After 
a twenty minutes’ walk we dive into long narrow streets, 
not over cleanly or well-paved. On each side are dingy 
houses and cellar dwellings —avifkta 3 cj/xara —reminding 
one of old Homer’s description of a similar region, and 
Pope’s bad translation :— 

There in a cheerless spot and gloomy cells, 

The dusky nation of Cimmeria dwells ; 

The sun ne’er views the uncomfortable seats, 

"When radiant he advances or retreats. 

Unhappy race! whom endless night invades, 

Clouds the dull air, and wraps them round in shades.* 

Before us stretches a vista of tall square chimneys, 
and stumpy round chimneys, and large buildings with¬ 
out chimneys at all, far as the eye can reach. The 
most prominent figures we see of the human species are 
two women of matronly appearance, with greasy shawls 
over their heads, standing in the middle of the street. 
They have just sent off their children to the school, and 
from their earnestness and self-satisfaction, they seem to 
be fully convinced that their offspring will be ornamental 
in the procession. Then, look at that blackguard reeling 
from the gin-shop with a bruised face and a black eye, 
unwashed and uncombed, coatless and ragged, the very 
picture of an irreclaimable scamp. Now that vagabond 

* Odyss. xi. 14. 

P 


VOL. I. 


210 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


—the very burlesque of a being with a reasoning 
mind—might, if he were sober and industrious, earn 
thirty shillings a week, and make his fireside and family 
comfortable ; and yet he staggers from the reeking vault 
into the blessed light of this sunny morning as if he 
were a character that need not be ashamed. Here we 
meet three or four little children who are looking pen¬ 
sive, poor things ! perhaps because they cannot join the 
procession. * They have no clothes fit to appear in, or it 
may be that they have never been at a Sunday-school. 
Are any of them the children of that drunken brute, 
who is just now reeling into a house close by, with an 
oath in his mouth, and a threatening scowl at his starv¬ 
ing wife ? Then a lurry, heavily laden with Manchester 
goods, rolls down the narrow street, disturbing the con¬ 
ference of the two ladies, and driving us up against the 
wall for safety. 

1 This is your school, is it ? ’ I inquired, after we had 
proceeded a little further. ‘ What a terrible hubbub 
and clatter ! Are you quite sure it is safe to go in with¬ 
out a body of policemen ? ’ 

We enter the room for the younger boys: there are 
some five hundred of them, dressed in a variety of 
fashions, and in every kind of material, from the round¬ 
about jacket to the square cut coat of the gamekeeper, 
from thick clogs to genteel highlows, from rough fustian 
to fine broadcloth, each with his cap or hat in his hand, 
ready to march out at the word of command. Here we 
have beautiful specimens of the juvenile operative under 
every aspect. They are all clean ; some are well- 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


211 


looking; many have a keen, intelligent expression of 
countenance, as though they had begun to fight their 
own way in life at an early age. Mark there that 
sturdy-looking young tyke: his large head is round 
as a ball; his hair is of a vermilion hue, and might 
have been scattered promiscuously where it rests as 
with a pitchfork; he has a 1 forehead villanous low,’ 
an undeniable squint, and a mouth like that of a cod¬ 
fish ; and he seems quite ready, from his dogged look, 
to have a tum-up with any boy in the class, and give 
him a stone. I have no great hopes of my friend: it 
is two to one that at some time or other he will ascend 
the steps of promotion on the tread-wheel, if he attain 
no greater elevation on the ladder of advancement. 
How I should like to place him under the tuition of our 
old friend, the Warden of St. Peter’s College, Eadley ! 
Excellent raw material he would be for Sewell’s experi¬ 
ments in moral discipline—a sort of free-born British 
Topsy ! Ascending a flight of stairs, we come to the 
room of the elder boys. Here we have about the 
same number as below. 

1 From this body,’ said my friend, ‘ you may select 
representatives of every trade in Manchester; there are 
mill-operatives, glass-blowers, painters, shoe-makers, 
tailors ; there are accountants, salesmen, porters, railway 
officials, lawyers’ clerks, packers; there are shopkeepers, 
mechanics, joiners, cabinet-makers. Fix upon a trade, 
and I think I can select a teacher or scholar who knows 
something about it.’ 

‘ Well, I rather like the look of the youths; they are 
r 2 


212 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


somewhat too sturdy and independent perhaps in their 
appearance, but many of them have very intelligent 
faces; they are seemingly men in habits of life before 
they are well out of their boyhood. Are they civil ? ’ 

‘ Yes, as a rule, the Manchester operative is civil 
enough, in a rough way. I mean the boy or man who 
is working for his living, not your Irish vagabond or 
your skulking thief. A day or two ago I was walking 
in a low part of the town, when a lad of sixteen, quite a 
stranger to me, dashed a few spots of mud on my coat 
as he was rushing by. Seeing that it was an accident 
I said nothing; but when he observed what he had 
done, he turned back, gave the coat a rough wipe, 
blundered out by way of apology, “ I could na help it, 
maester,” and hastened away again. In polite society it 
would have been, u I really beg your pardon, sir, it was 
quite unintentional; ” but I am not sure whether there 
w r as not something intrinsically more gentlemanly in the 
rough wipe, and “ I could na help it, maester.” ’ 

We enter a third room. Here are some six hundred 
little girls, and a very pretty lot they are; many a 
mother has been proud this morning, after dressing her 
children and sending them off to join the procession; 
she remembers how, some twenty years ago, she had 
herself marched from the same school on the same day; 
and becomes a girl herself again for a while. Many of 
the little ladies certainly seem to have been got up with 
great care for the occasion, and, with incipient female 
vanity, are evidently conscious of their charms. One 
flight of steps more, and we are in the topmost room. 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


213 


This is the show-room—the conservatory! Five hundred 
of the elder females, most of them young women, are 
here—milliners, bonnet-makers, dress-makers, waistcoat- 
makers, umbrella-makers, hat-binders, weavers, dou¬ 
blers, smallware-workers, and whatever else you can fix 
on in the feminine line of occupation. What a variety 
of faces and features ! What countless fashions in frocks, 
mantillas, and bonnets! What numberless styles in the 
arrangement of hair and artificials ! 

‘ A. large and interesting family you have here on 
your hand,’ I said,—‘and, to my surprise, they are 
tolerably well-looking, on the whole. I had expected 
to find so many galvanized red herrings, just awaking 
out of pickle—smoke-dried, withered, blear-eyed old 
women in their teens; and positively many of them are 
rather attractive—all of them neat and becomingly 
dressed. How do they look so well and dress so well ? 

‘ Indeed,’ returned my friend, ‘ I often wonder my¬ 
self. The times have been somewhat pressing this 
last six months; wages have been low, and work has 
been scarce ; provisions too have been high ; and yet 
they generally keep up a respectable appearance, and 
many of them pay for their own sittings at church. I fear 
they have to pinch themselves severely, sometimes.’ 

‘ I am surprised at their fresh looks.’ 

‘ Yes, they are blooming now ; but they soon begin 
to lo.ok old. They mostly marry young, and in a few 
years after they sink into aged women. You are a 
judge of a horse’s mouth, I know : now, if you would 
examine the teeth of these young women, you would 


214 


A WH1TWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


find them generally defective. Life in an impure atmo¬ 
sphere and long hours of work begin to tell on the 
mouth sooner than on the cheek.’ 

A Procession. 

Well, I declare, who would have thought it? Here 
am I, a layman—one who never before in my life saw 
a Sunday-school containing more than fifty children— 
here am I, in some square or other, surrounded by 
clergymen in canonicals, churchwardens with their 
staves of office, vergers in their gowns, and teachers and 
scholars innumerable. This is the gathering point for 
all the schools: fresh divisions are trooping up; 
banners are flying ; bands are playing; bells are ringing. 
I never had a very earnest longing for the 1 grinning 
honours ’ of the Crimea ; but really everything looks so 
inspiriting around me, that at the present moment I 
should not shrink from a gentle tussle with a Cossack.* 
March ! is the word ; we fall into our ranks, and away 
we move, six abreast. Windows are full of peering 
faces, beautiful, no doubt; the streets are lined on each 
side with parents who were once Sunday-scholars 
themselves. Occasionally a mother will press for¬ 
ward as she sees her child passing, give it a hasty 
drink of milk, for the day is warm, and send it on again 
with a—‘ Bless its little heart, it’s a hangel! ’ Now and 
then a mercurial lad rushes from, his rank in defiance of 


* [Written in 1856—1866.] 


A WH1TWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


215 


teachers, and makes a hasty purchase of a ha’porth of 
toffy from a greasy-looking siren with a stand of sweet¬ 
meats, and then joins again the main body. 

Looking round from an eminence on the moving 
crowd, what a rolling stream of parasols seems to be 
before us ! The sight, pleasing as it is to the eye, is 
not altogether unmixed with a sensation of sadness. 
Here are fifteen thousand young people, boys and girls, 
men and women, to whom life is in its morning, in 
health and high spirits now, it may be, but with the 
stern battle of a dark future before them. Many a hard 
day’s work—many an aching head and a weary hand— 
many a combat with poverty—many a struggle with sor¬ 
row and sickness—await these toilers and moilers in the 
great workshop of the world. And many will sink 
prematurely, having crossed but a few arches of Mirza’s 
bridge, and disappear in the stream below to be seen 
no more. 

But on we move at a funereal pace, bands playing 
and banners waving : the sun is hot and heavy on our 
heads; the pavement is hard and rough on our feet. 
Is this pilgrimage of grace, I wonder, intended to have 
a penitential import? Now the crowd thickens; enor¬ 
mous lurries are waiting on each side of the street till 
the procession has passed, while their burly drivers are 
looking on with a sulky resignation. Here large vehi¬ 
cles are filled with spectators who have paid a penny 
each for their seats. Well-a-day ! To think that I who 
have ridden along Rotten Row on a high-trotting horse 
to the admiration of half the beauty and fashion in 


216 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTEB. 


Hyde Park should have lived to be made a penny show 
of! To suppose that I should be exhibited like a 
pickled sea serpent, or a stuffed mermaid, to a crowd of 
gaping factory operatives and country clodpoles at a 
copper a head ! 

Young Manchester let loose. 

The suburbs of Manchester, so far as I saw them, are 
beautiful enough. If you expect to find a dingy, smoky, 
dreary neighbourhood, you will be agreeably surprised. 
Everything that wealth and taste can supply has been 
employed in decorating a district not unfavoured by 
nature, with all the attractions of architecture, shrub¬ 
bery, and lawn. So rapid however is the building, that 
the suburbs are every year thrust farther out into the 
country; and where they will rest seems a problem. No 
one lives in Manchester proper; it is occupied by 
warehouses, shops, and factories; even the shopkeepers 
for the most part have their residences away. Inn¬ 
keepers haunt the middle of the city, and some few 
medical men have their solitary habitations there ; but 
the central part of Manchester may be said to be left, 
every midnight and every Sunday, to take care of itself 
with the assistance of a policeman here and there. I was 
greatly surprised at the aspect of wealth and comfort 
which these interminable suburban villas presented. 
Here is the mansion of a Turkey merchant, and by its 
side stands another belonging to a wealthy citizen in 
the gin-shop line. Here is the magnificent residence of 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


217 


a whiskered foreigner, and close at hand we see the no 
less stylish one of a speculator in corn and flour, dealer 
and chapman. 

‘ Who lives there ? ’ I asked, pointing to a very 
splendid mansion, with its spacious grounds and bloom¬ 
ing green-houses; 1 one of your merchant princes, I 
suppose ? ’ 

i Yes,’ was the answer, 1 he was a merchant, and he is 
as rich as a prince. He was a pawnbroker, and dealt 
in second-hand clothes—probably he does still.’ 

i The deuce he does ! he must give 3001. a year for 
his house.’ 

Then Manchester has its parks for the recreation of 
its toiling inhabitants. There are three, situated re¬ 
spectively at different points in the suburbs. They are 
rather after the fashion of extensive gardens and plea¬ 
sure-grounds, but they have received the more baronial 
name. They are laid out with considerable taste, and 
contain all the paraphernalia for games and gymnastic 
exercises. They have labyrinths, or, as these are styled, 
puzzle-grounds, for the exercise of youthful ingenuity; 
they have lakes on which swans with rather dusky 
feathers sail majestically. The black swan is no longer 
a rara avis in terris. In one of them there is a very in¬ 
teresting museum, as well as a library of twenty thou¬ 
sand volumes. These parks, as I learned, are a great 
boon to the labouring population. On the half holiday 
of the Saturday afternoon especially, the young people 
visit them, and the artisan, with his wife and family, 
may be seen there, enjoying the fresh air after his week- 


218 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


day toils, and admiring the summer flowers, while his 
children are romping on the grassy slopes. 

Into one of these parks we are turned loose with 
Sunday scholars and teachers almost beyond number. 
Away they rush impetuously, like so many wild asses’ 
colts, in a hundred directions after their several amuse¬ 
ments, and in no long time they are in the midst of 
their games and romps. See those dozen girls of ten or 
twelve years of age dancing round the flag-staff, with 
their hair streaming behind them, and shrieking with 
laughter as one, more unlucky than the rest, measures 
her length on the ground. Some, less lively, are quietly 
gathering daisies, buttercups, and hyacinths, and hoard¬ 
ing them as a treasure. It is a pleasant thing to 
observe a love of wild flowers in the child that rarely 
emerges out of its dingy street. True to the instincts 
of our nature is that well-known simile of John 
Milton:— 

As one who, long in populous city pent, 

Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air, 

Forth issuing on a summer’s morn, to breathe 
Among the pleasant villages, and farms 
Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight : 

The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine, 

Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound. 

But to return to our wild flock. Here a party of 
lads, more robust, are as intent on a game of cricket 
as though their lives depended on it; there, is another 
set hot in the excitement of leap-frog; there again is 
another engaged at a match of football. Enormous 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


219 


clusters of boys and girls are busy at 1 Thread the 
needle,’ and 1 Prison bars,’ and * Stick in the ring.’ 
The ground occupied is like the vicinity of a hive 
of bees in the act of swarming. I must confess that, 
however pleasing it is to see enjoyment in those who 
rarely get it, I look upon these wild gambols with 
a species of alarm. What would be my doom if 
a thousand young imps were to set upon me ? I 
fancy I should come out of the fray a thing of 4 shreds 
and patches.’ What were Actseon and his hounds 
to a poor fellow hunted by a thousand frantic lads and 
lasses let loose from a factory ? And more unlikely 
things have happened than such a chase. During 
Whitweek, and in the fields, authority is set at nought. 
It is the Saturnalia of ancient Rome: the young rascals 
claim the privilege of rolling you on the ground with 
your Bond Street coat on, and laughing at you into the 
bargain. Well, methinks these Whitsuntide merry¬ 
makings have been expelled from the country, and taken 
refuge in populous towns; for the only places I know 
where young folks at this season are accustomed to roll 
down grassy slopes, like so many hogsheads of sugar, 
are the Queen’s parks at Manchester and Greenwich. 

A Tea Party. 

By my word, but this is a tea-party with a vengeance 1 
A monster meeting, with monster tea-urns, and monster 
coffee-pots, and monster muffins ! We are in number 
about six hundred ; the assembly is made up of all 


220 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


classes—clergymen, ladies, gentlemen, sunday-scholars, 
teachers, superintendents, and friends of those connected 
with the school; it consists of all ages, from the infant 
in arms to the grey-headed grandfather. The clock 
strikes six; all the viands are on the table; the waiters 
are in attendance; grace is sung; and six hundred 
persons commence an onslaught, fierce and terrible, on 
the creature-comforts before them. Mighty piles of 
bread-and-butter melt away like snow-heaps in the 
sunshine, only more rapidly; now and then you hear, 
amid the confused hum and clatter, some lively lads 
crying out for more currant loaf, and you see an animated 
scramble for it when it comes; here and there you may 
mark those who go to work in a business-like way, as 
though they were determined to have their full eight- 
pennyworth, with something besides ; some few it may 
be, exhibit an increasing rotundity of person, or as 
Mr. Weller has it, ‘ a wisible swellin’.’ One thing is 
manifest, that all the faces in the room are pictures of 
innocent enjoyment and genial mirth. 

The second grace has been sung, the tea-trays have 
been removed, the dessert has been arranged, and now 
for ‘ the feast of reason and the flow of soul.’ 

1 What next ? ’ I inquired. 

‘ Now comes the oratory,’ was the reply ; 1 after the 
guests have been satisfied with the sensual, they rise to 
the higher pleasures of the intellectual.’ 

Several sensible speeches were delivered, bearing upon 
the practical duties of daily life,—on the temptations of 
youth and the responsibility of parents. Some of the 


A WH1TWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


221 


orators seemed to me to be scarcely so bappy either in 
the choice of their topics or in their mode of handling 
them. Take the case of the Rev. Mr. Sputterby. When 
he was called upon to address the assembly, there was a 
perceptible sensation among the guests. Evidently 
Sputterby was a popular character, for the knocking 
and cheering became unpleasantly boisterous. Now 
Brother Sputterby was powerful in the prophecies; and 
what with Sebastopols and Armageddons, cannons’ 
mouths and fiery horse-tails, and the mysterious three 
sixes, he kept up such a martial clatter, that the lads, 
who did not understand a word of what he said, seemed 
ready, for fun’s sake, to march to the tune of his 4 drum 
ecclesiastic.’ He fought battles, past and future; he 
twisted himself into knots, like an eel or a Merry Andrew; 
he distorted his features into the most apish grimaces; 
and he sat down amidst vociferous applause. Listen, 
again, to the lucubrations of a layman. Mr. Mompas 
was called up, and a most lugubrious and lengthened 
orator he proved; like a wounded snake, his speech 
dragged its slow length along, interspersed with pauses 
of unusual duration. Our condition was that of the 
rusticus expectans watching the stream. Mr. Mompas 
was grieved and sorrowful at everything and everybody; 
he seemed to grudge the young their small modicum of 
amusement, and was inclined to condemn their most 
innocent pleasures. He kept continually appealing to 
his conscience for comfort, and, I think, most would have 
been well pleased to let him enjoy it all without envy¬ 
ing him his treasure. 


222 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


The evening was enlivened with music and singing of 
a sacred character; and all retired thoroughly satisfied 
with their entertainment, and, so far as I could judge, 
>viser and better on the whole for what they had heard. 

1 1 know you are a great advocate for Sunday-Schools,’ 
I said to my host, after we had returned home ; 1 but, in 
conducting them, have you always the round men in 
the round holes, and the square men in the square holes ? ’ 

1 Few things, my dear sir, are perfect in life ; certainly 
not Sunday-schools, which are conducted gratuitously. 
But, notwithstanding this, the Sunday-school has wrought 
an incalculable amount of good among our manufacturing 
populations. Why, where will you go to escape from 
these mouthing Sputterbys and moping Mompasses ? Do 
they not abound on platforms, and haunt Exeter Xiall ? 
Do they not thrive in the atmosphere of the House of 
Commons, and are they not found at select tea-parties ? ’ 

‘ The races held in Manchester during this week, were 
harped on to-night a good deal. Would it not have been 
better to have avoided all allusion to them ? Is it not like 
throwing temptation in the path of the young V 

t Yes; it is better perhaps to say nothing about such 
scenes in a party like that we have just left. Still, 
Manchester is notorious for its gambling character at all 
times; and it may not be amiss to warn the young 
against that fatal propensity. The betting mania is 
very general indeed here. Growing cubs in warehouses 
—lads in mills, earning eight shillings a week—salesmen 
with 300 1. a year—shopkeepers’ apprentices—dashing 
merchants and mill-owners, the sons of industrious 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


223 


parents—all alike have their betting books. Broken- 
down overlookers in factories take a beer-house and 
establish a sweep in secret. The gambling propensity 
has been the ruin of several young men of my acquaint¬ 
ance w T ho seemed at one time to promise as fairly as 
those with whom we took tea this evening. If you were 
to see the crowds that gather in certain streets, when 
they are expecting the issue of some racing u event ” to 
be there announced, you would perceive at once how 
low in the scale of society this infatuation descends, 
and you would wonder how men and boys, who cannot 
or will not afford to buy soap or to mend their clothes, 
should embark their wages in bets and sweepstakes. 
Indeed, I have seen blear-eyed old women whose whole 
wardrobe might be valued at eighteen pence, bringing 
their shilling or half-crown, to stake it on some race 
about which they knew nothing in the world. But to 
bed ! to bed! and may Morpheus, alias Mompas, be 
with you ! ’ 


A Cheap Tpjp. 

Time, half-past six o’clock. Place, Railway Station. 
Scene, crowds, hot-pressed and animated. What 
crushing, and elbowing, and scrambling, and shout¬ 
ing ! Cheap excursion trains are receiving their living 
freight, and passing off, one after another, to their 
several destinations. Railway officials are bustling 
about in perplexity ; guards are truculent; porters are 
swearig ; whistles are emitting their unearthly screech \ 


224 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


crowds, thickly packed and waiting for their turn, are 
undulating to and fro like waves in easy motion ; chil¬ 
dren are crying; little sisters are lost in the confusion ; 
mothers are screaming ; a few couples of lads here and 
there are having a boxing-match a-piece on their own 
account; ‘ chaos is come again.’ 

Our party, consisting of Sunday-scholars, teachers, 
superintendents, with their friends, amounting to some 
two thousand, are destined for one of the watering places 
on the Lancashire coast; we have engaged to travel fifty 
miles there and as many back for eightpence a-head. 
Nor to the bulk of our fellow-passengers will there be 
any expense in refreshments at the far end. See that 
stout lad with a heavy basket on his arm; it contains 
the day’s provisions for himself and four little brothers 
and sisters. Look at the young people throughout; 
some are carrying reticules, which seem pressed out at 
the sides with their load of eatables ; others have their 
food wrapped up in clean cotton pocket-handker¬ 
chiefs; here and there a young one, impelled by an 
irresistible yearning, has already begun to nibble at the 
pastry that was intended for his twelve o’clock dinner. 
‘Come here, John, and let us see what you have got 
inside that handkerchief! What kind of a baggin has 
your mother put up for you to-day?’ First we lay 
bare a finely-developed rhubarb-pie, like in circum¬ 
ference and shape a soup-plate, with a certain look of 
acidity about its features, and with a crust to all 
appearance as impenetrable as granite ; next appears a 
sandwich of extraordinary dimensions, or, as the lad 


A WH1TWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


22 o 


himself calls it,a piece of flesh-meat between buttercakes; 
then a stone bottle of milk completes the preparation for 
John’s picnic repast. £ Well done, John, my lad, don’t 
eat it all before you get to the far end.’ 

4 Holla ! forward there ! ’ shouted to our party a 
railway official, with a sheet of instructions in his hand. 
The row, which for a space had failed, now recommences 
doubly thundering. Onward march the lads at a pretty 
steady pace, till they get a full view of their carriages, 
when there is a simultaneous rush for places. Woe to 
those who are caught in the living cataract! One school 
superintendent I remarked who had unfortunately taken 
lip a position in advance. He looked in his white neck¬ 
cloth very like a Methodist preacher; and was apparently 
gazing into the blue heavens, oblivious of all sublunary 
matters, when the stream swept him off his legs, and 
rolling down a steep embankment, he was picked up in 
palpitations by a benevolent navvy who was coming to 
his work. On rush the madcaps ; many of them never 
think of waiting for a porter to open the carriage door, 
but over the sides they go pell-mell; legs and feet are 
seen twirling in the air like windmill sails, while hands 
and heads are plumping on the floor inside. Some 
of the carriages are uncovered, and have been used 
for the conveyance of cattle; the boys seeing this 
begin to low like oxen and bleat like sheep, and one 
of them, who is the wit of the party, asks a sulky porter 
how soon they are going to start for the butcher or the 
fair. Meanwhile the females, with due gallantry, are 
put into more commodious carriages; and we, who are 
VOL. i. Q 


226 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER . 


of the more fortunate order, have the privilege of seats 
in a first-class. 

Whistle ! grunt! bang ! bang ! off we go. What a 
strange sensation does your lie-a-bed experience, when 
by some accident he is brought to breathe the pure air of 
a May morning at seven o’clock, and to rejoice with the 
gladsome birds as the sun is shining in the clear sky 
and the dew-drops are glittering in its beams ! He 
wonders how anyone can possibly remain in bed while 
the earth is looking so fresh and young: and yet, O 
human frailty ! on the following morning he is found 
between the sheets at ten o’clock. 

At length we arrive at our destination, when the un¬ 
packing of the train is as expeditiously accomplished as 
was the packing. At first the neighbourhood of the 
station is occupied by one dense crowd ; then the human 
stream begins to branch off in a variety of directions as 
from one capacious reservoir; and by degrees the larger 
ducts separate into rivulets, each to flow in its own 
channel. Among the Sunday scholars and teachers 
there are generally sets and parties united by some bond 
of union; and each of these has pre-arranged for itself 
the programme of the day’s proceedings. They lose no 
time in fixing severally upon some lodging, to be theirs 
while they stay ; and then they unpack their provisions, 
which are mostly abundant enough in all conscience, and 
which they have in common. Then, after some refresh¬ 
ment, they sally forth, often subdividing into pairs: there 
will be no inconsiderable amount of love-making perpe¬ 
trated to-day. 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


227 


The watering-place proved to be a very interesting 
one : the coast lies open to the ocean, and the tide rolls 
up in great majesty. It was out when we arrived, and 
the multitudes that had come by the various trains were 
spread far and wide along the beach. As we stood upon 
a high cliff, we could see them wandering along for 
miles, snuffing the sea-breeze and watching the billows 
as they were rolling and tumbling head over heels at 
their feet. Probably fifteen thousand excursionists were 
there on that day—hard-working fathers and mothers 
from the inland towns of the county—young men and 
women who for ten hours each week-day inhale the 
oil-impregnated atmosphere of a factory—brawny me¬ 
chanics who ply the file with dexterous fingers, or scatter 
the sparks from the anvil ‘ like chaff on the threshing 
floor ’ —sickly-looking dress-makers who have to stitch 
longer than the factory operative has to spin—all dally¬ 
ing with the amorous sea-breeze, and holding up their 
faces to be bronzed by the mid-day sun. The fashionable 
visitors who stay their months at these watering-places 
look very contemptuously on us cheap-trippists, and pro¬ 
bably such excursions may sometimes give rise to scenes 
of an unseemly character; but the heart of that man must 
be very torpid who cannot endure some trifling annoyance 
and pass by some solecisms in behaviour, when he reflects 
that thousands of his less-favoured brethren are enjoying 
themselves innocently for the day, and recruiting their toil- 
worn limbs and sorely-tried lungs for future exertion.* 

* Lord Campbell, when he was excogitating the severest terms 
of censure on the arrangements for conveying our hereditary legis- 


228 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


1 What would our grandfathers say, I wonder,’ asked 
my friend, ‘ if they could stand in this crowd, and learn 
that all these operatives have come fifty miles for a 
day’s recreation at the seaside, and will return home to 
supper the same evening ? Half a century ago a work¬ 
ing man was a great traveller who had been ten miles 
from his own fireside. In so far as the daily life of the 
million is concerned, Watt and his fellow-inventors have 
exerted a greater influence than all your philosophers, 
from Aristotle to Bacon, and from Bacon downwards— 
than all your poets, from Homer to Shakspeare, and 
from Shakspeare to the present Laureate—and all your 
politicians since patriotism first broke its shell. For 
practical progress, the last hundred years may be weighed 
against the aggregate of the centuries that preceded it.’ 

Here we come up to four or five lads—hobble-de-hoys 
—each much as iEschylus describes his boy-warrior: 

aySpSircus avi]p * 
crre^ei S’ touAos &pn dta Traprjtdaiv.* 

lators to the naval review (1856), said that their train might have 
been one of Manchester excursionists. Excuse me, my lord, such 
things are managed better in Manchester. It is for our Govern¬ 
ment so to arrange a pleasure-trip as to thrust cabinet ministers 
and greengrocers, judges and fishmongers, bishops and twopenny 
postmen, into the same carriage; and to bring the satins and 
velvets of peeresses on to bare boards, warm from the corduroys 
of pig-butchers and cattle-jobbers. And then, countesses tramp¬ 
ing through the streets at four o’clock in the morning, as though 
they were vendors of cabbages from Covent-Garden market. 
Manchester excursionists, forsooth! 

* Sep. Coni. The. 1. 528. 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


229 


These youths clearly have never been at the seaside be¬ 
fore ; they are wondering why the water is rising at their 
feet. Hear them. One sagely believes that the steamer 
which is some miles away is driving up the waves; 
another attributes the fact to a gentle breeze which is 
blowing from the west; a third has read something 
about the tides, but his stock of information seems 
about as confused as the stock of a dealer in marine 
stores. 

1 Well, my lads,’ I said, joining in the conversation, 
‘ can’t you make out why it is that the waters are rising ? 
The question has puzzled greater philosophers than you 
are.’ 

Here I endeavoured to explain to them the common 
theory on the subject, and the youths seemed to listen 
with attention for awhile; the lad of some reading was 
evidently interested in the lecture, when one of them, 
who was apparently the leader of the party, began to 
walk away, and, turning round, said to my pupil, with 
an assumption of acuteness, 1 Come along wi’ thee, Bill; 
the genleman’s nobbut mak-ing a foo o’ thee.’ I wonder 
what their impressions were when, in three hours, the 
sea had covered the whole expanse of sands, and was 
rolling against the cliffs and breakwaters with its crested 
billows and moaning monotone. 

The sands were dry and spacious, well adapted for 
walking and riding. Alas! alas! pity the poor little 
donkeys. For my own part 1 have an affection for the 
species; whether it be from that ‘ fellow-feeling which 
makes us wondrous kind,’-1 know not. But your donkey, 


230 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


in my judgment, is an intellectual and faithful animal, 
notwithstanding some seeming inconsistencies in his 
conduct. I always feel inclined to fight the brute who 
is abusing his donkey. Poor toiling creatures ! Ye 
have but little reason to look forward with pleasure to 
these cheap trips. Boys and girls, full-grown young 
men and bouncing young women—all are determined to 
take equestrian or asinestrian exercise once in their lives,, 
though in most cases it seems anything but an agreeable 
operation. We came upon four or five young women of 
our party, who were racing like so many Chifneys: when 
unfortunately a cross occurred; donkey charged donkey, 
and down plumped one of the lady jockeys on the sand, 
and was dragged ignominiously for some yards by the 
foot. Euripides relates of Polyxena, the daughter of 
Priam and Hecuba, when she was immolated by the 
Greeks on the tomb of Achilles, that she made it a point 
to ‘ fall decently.’ 

TtoW^v irp6voiav elxevax'bpoos ireae7v, 

KpVTTTOVa & KpVTTTClV 6p.fJ.aT apOTeVUV XpS&V* 

Now Miss Mullen either had not time, or did not care 
to take any such precaution. She had not been brought 
up under Hecuba. 

What’s Hecuba to her, or she to Hecuba ? 

She jumped up in great haste, shook herself down, 
dashed the sand off her clothes, gave the donkey- 
boy a ‘good saucing,’ and joined her party on foot with 
a sort of nonchalance, though evidently, from the sly 


* Hecuba , 1. 567. 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


231 


wandering of her hand, therewere sundry stinging sand- 
scratches about her which she did not please to divulge. 

As we were walking along the beach, we fell in with 
a party of some twenty, apparently from Oldham, who 
were in a state of great perplexity. The tide had run 
up one of the creeks, and surrounded them. Some 
persons were shouting to them from a distance, bewil¬ 
dering them more and more, till they seemed quite as 
likely to rush into the sea as to make for terra jirma. 
Coming up, we made the affrighted party understand their 
position ; when, without more ado, the lads and lasses 
bounced into the water, and, though it ran nearly knee- 
deep, they seemed to care very little about their display 
of calves and garters. When they gained the safe side, 
they joined heartily in the laugh with the spectators, 
and some jokes, more sprightly than refined, appeared 
to create considerable amusement among them. 

See there ! some score who have just landed from a 
boating excursion. The sea has acquired the name of 
treacherous, and it seems to deserve it. Certainly to 
these ladies and gentlemen who are evidently from some 
inland town, the blue expanse of waters has put on 
a deceitful aspect. They came down for health and 
pleasure. Where could they be more likely to find 
these blessings than as they bounded over the billows of 
the deep ? To them ‘ old Ocean smiled; ’ they listened 
to the a yf]f)iOfj.ov ytXaafxa of the tantalizing rogue, till 
they'must needs mount upon his back in a pleasure-boat. 
Alas for human foresight ! Look at that young gentle¬ 
man with the turn-down collar, and the pretty maiden 


232 A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 

by bis side ! He is a poet, and embarked reciting the 
lines— 

O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea, 

Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free— 

and apostrophizing Dickson’s boat as a phantom that 
1 walks the waters like a thing of life.’ Poor fellow ! 
Quantum mutatvs ab illo ! All his poetry has been 
pumped out of him; his apostrophes have ‘ died into an 
echo ; ’ his rhapsodies are floating away upon the winds, 
now somewhere over the Isle of Man; he is for the time 
oeing a very prosaic personage. Then how miserable 
looks that pale young lady, the idol of his affections! 
Pier long hair is dangling from her bonnet as if it had 
been dipped in salt water. O why should lovely 
woman tempt the treacherous deep? Is it not a 
humiliating view of human nature, to see a seraphic 
creature rolled up into a heap like a bundle of dirty 
rags, while a villanous stewardess is pouring cold 
brandy and water down her throat as through a funnel. 

Roaming along we fell in with a cluster of young men 
belonging to our party who were members of a Mutual 
Improvement Society, and were storing up ideas for an 
essay on their day’s trip, or a poem on the wonders of 
the great deep. They were very intelligent, and rather 
gentlemanlike in address and manner, and from what I 
could observe they had gone through a course of reading 
iar more extensive than I could have expected from any 
who are engaged in business through the day. 

1 How have those young fellows picked up their infor¬ 
mation ? ’ I inquired. 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


233 


‘ From Mutual Improvement Societies, Free Libraries, 
Mechanics’ Institutes, and such like sources. Some 
of them will write a better essay than either you or I 
could when we were undergraduates at Oxford.’ 

‘ What are their employments ? ’ 

1 Various : most of them are in warehouses—bustling, 
active, pushing men of business, who will discuss with 
you on work-days the price of fustians, flannels, calicoes 
and “ domestics.” With moderate luck some will get on 
in life, and become masters of establishments themselves. 
Who knows but that the smart youngster in the light- 
coloured paletot may be one day mayor of Manchester ? ’ 
‘ Have they really any poetical ability ? ’ 
i Well, poetry is scarcely their forte. Manchester 
smoke is not an atmosphere in which that faculty can 
thrive, and the Manchester trade is too matter-of-fact a 
soil for its growth. Still, some of them will bring out 
smart thoughts and fine-sounding words in their poem 
on the ocean, as you shall see. If you will write for the 
prize yourself, we will elect you here on the sands a 
member of the Society.’ 

1 It is some time since I have exercised that poetic 
genius which I was supposed to have as a natural gift. 
My last effort was for the Newdigate ; but as I heard 
nothing from the Vice-Chancellor after sending in my 
poem, I fancy the adjudicators were too blind to recog¬ 
nise its merits. But I will try again, if it will please 
you.’ 

I venture to insert here the result of my marine 
inspiration. I believe that my sonnets smack of the 


234 


A WHITWEEK IE MANCHESTER. 


sea-breeze. If however they have gained the Mutual 
Improvement Society’s prize, all I can say is, that it has 
not been announced to me; neither have I received the 
last edition of Tennyson’s works, which was promised 
as the reward of merit. 


SEASIDE SONNETS. 

MIND AND MATTER. 

By what a secret and electric chain 

Are mind and memory linked to outward things ! 
How slight the causes whence each moment springs 
Unconsciously our feelings’ varied train ! 

Lo, as yon cloud its darkening shadow flings 
Athwart the spangled deep, an unknown pain 
Of loneliness around existence clings, 

As when some parting friend or dying strain 
Of music leaves us sorrowful. Again 

The light bursts forth as on an angel’s wings ! 

How the heart leaps ! Into Thy secret laws 
And subtle agencies, Thou First great Cause, 

’Tis vain to pry; enough it is to feel 

The inward joys which outward things reveal. 

NIGHT. 

At this lone hour how many an eye is waking, 

On the still ocean, wet with memory’s tear! 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


235 


At this lone hour how many a heart is breaking, 
While neither friend nor comforter is near! 

Some wanderer now, forsaken and forsaking, 

Laments her friends, her home, her parents dear, 
No more her present solace;—ay, but most 

Perchance her memory clings with hope and fear 
To one fond image, now for ever lost— 

Her heart of hearts—her light of virgin love. 
Poor helpless wanderer ! Thy heart is chill— 
Chill as the star-bespangled heavens above : 

’Tis vain to weep: bid memory be still, 

And with a patient mind obey the Almighty Will. 


SUNSET. 

No cloud is to be seen ; the western sky 
Is crimsoned by the sun’s infusing beams; 

No breezes wrinkle ocean’s brow, which gleams 
With countless tints more beauteous than the dye 
Of its own purple ; yet—I know not why— 

My heart is sad, as when some troubled dreams. 
Some dark, vague fancies, cling to memory. 

On such an eve I wandered on this shore 
In happy mood with one beloved friend. 

That voice is heard, that form is seen, no more; 
Far, far away ! O memory, how thy ties 
Form our existence ! but on man depend— 

On him alone—thy various sympathies; 

The thought of well-spent hours eternity defies. 


236 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


THE FISHERMAN. 

While rank and wealth in princely pomp arrayed 
Assemble here, by listless tedium driven, 

To waste the unprized gifts which chance hath given, 
Lone Fisherman, thou pliest thy dangerous trade 
To spur the jaded appetite, afraid 

Lest thine own cot should want the simplest bread. 
Surely has Nature, with a partial hand, 

Scattered her bounties o’er this favoured land. 

While thousands feast, and on the downy bed 
Repose their limbs, full many a wanderer 
Knows not whereon to lay his weary head. 

It must be so ; but would the rich confer 
On humble life some cherishing regard, 

The thanks of grateful hearts would be a rich reward.* 


MEMORY. 

’Tis gone—I saw the tottering mass of earth 
Foil on the waves ; the gull, in search of prey, 
Rose from the mist of upward dashing spray, 

And screamed a paean of triumphant mirth 
At its worn-out existence. I have stood 
Oft on its hanging brow, and watched the flood 
Consume its natural battlements ; to-morrow 
I shall not And it in my pensive way; 

* *'H KaKbv 6 ypiirevs £<&ei 0(oy, § 8 o/uos a vavs, 

K a) irovos eVri OaKaaaa, ko\ ixOvs a tc Kayos &ypa. 

Moschus, Id. 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


237 


But memory witli a mild, yea, pleasing sorrow, 

Will bid it rise from out the waters grey, 

Clothed in more beauteous dress. The things of sense 
Recede, but their departure or decay 
Gives birth to images more fair than they, 

Which constitute a being, lasting and intense. 

A STORM. 

Thou who are sheltered by a happy home, 

And cheered by conversation’s social power, 

Feel for the mariner in this dread hour; 

O feel for him whose lot it is to roam 

On the tumultuous water’s trackless waste ! 

See how yon vessel strives to gain the bay ! 

See how its labouring sides and bending mast 
Spring from the mountain-waves and howling blast I 
Now bounding high, now hidden by the spray.— 
Dread Power, how variously dost Thou display 
Thine attributes ; and chiefly dost Thou show 
Their grandeur on the eternal ocean vast. 

But peace, be still! let no wild raptures flow, 

While the warm heart should feel for others’ woe. 


MORNING AFTER A STORM. 

Slowly the sun from out its crimson veil 

Emerged, and from light’s ever-spotless font 
Scattered its spangles o’er the Hellespont; 


238 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


Far on its bank the gilded robe and mail 
Of countless warriors shone ; and on the gale 
Was borne the hum of millions ; in their front 
A monarch stood—no prouder form was there*— 
Who, eastward turning, to the Orient prayed, 

And to the deep his costly offerings made. 

But as this morning’s sun, serene and fair, 

Rose on the dread and still deep-heaving wave, 

A purer offering moved the stilly air,— 

Thanks to that Power, whose arm is strong to save,— 
To Him who only hears the suppliant’s prayer ! 

MOONLIGHT. 

How still thou movest round thy starry throne, 

Pale wanderer ! the poet’s pen of old 
Endued thee with a heart of human mould ; 

And as thou wanderest, silent and alone, 

Feigned that thy thoughts were with Endymion. 

And well—for on the silent desert-wold, 

Or ocean vast, no lonelier heart can weep, 

And longing yearn for home’s forsaken fold. 

Roll on—roll on, as thou hast ever rolled; 

Thy sleepless eye, which wakes while others sleep, 

Must yet unnumbered miseries behold, 

From pole to pole, on earth and ocean deep : 

O not from love thy heart is sad and cold_ 

It feels for human woe, seen, pitied, though untold ! 

* For Herodotus’s description of Xerxes and his army, see 
Book vii. 187. 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER 


239 


FAITH. 

0 thou art happy, ever rolling ocean ! 

How lovely too in thy bright, dancing mirth ! 

And to the sounds of thy light-hearted motion 
In sunny smiles responds thy sister Earth. 

0 could ye speak in concert your devotion, 

And tell us how at first ye darted forth 
From gloom and chaos at the Great Command— 

How still within the hollow of His hand 

Ye rest on firm foundations,—could ye tell 
How ye are roused before the Almighty breath 
In wrath and madness,—it might then be well 
For the proud heart and hardened infidel. 

But no, forgive ! O where were then the Faith 
That gains the prize by fight—by conquering unknown 
Death ? 


What an age it seems since Monday morning last! 
What a week of weeks has this been in its duration! 
If Locke’s theory be correct, that ‘ time is measured by 
the succession of ideas,’* what a pretty busy train of them 
must have been galloping through my brain for the last 
few days ! But is this theory correct ? I hope not: for 
if it be, most certainly the lives of some of my acquaint¬ 
ance will be very short indeed. 

A moralist would close his diary with the self-exa- 


* Essay, &c. ii. 14. 


240 


A WHITWEEK IN MANCHESTER. 


mination—What benefit have I derived from this visit ? 
What addition have I made to my stock of knowledge ? 
What clearer perception of moral duty have I acquired ? 
Be it so: I am not afraid to meet this inquiry. I 
believe that I have gained in one week a more perfect 
acquaintance with the condition of our manufacturing 
people than I could have done in a lifetime from books 
and newspapers. Blue-books are all very well in their 
way ; but they are only the dry bones of truth. I have 
learned that, though the toil of our operatives may be 
hard and long, yet are the enjoyments of many among 
them real and hearty. I have seen that, though among 
such populations there is much vicious self-indulgence, 
religion and virtue may yet flourish there, and the better 
feelings of our nature grow and expand. I have found 
that comfort is within the reach of most of our toiling 
people, but that it can only be obtained by a course of 
honesty, sobriety, and industry. And I have discovered, 
that where misery dogs the heels of the man or woman, 
it is mostly a self-created monster. I return home, I 
trust, a wiser and a better man—with more knowledge 
of the world and more love towards my poorer brethren. 
It often requires an acquaintance merely with our 
fellow-men to remove our preconceived ill opinion of 
them. When we view persons or places from a distance 
through the spectacles of class prejudices, we mostly 
shut one eye to the good that is in them and open the 
other only to the evil. 


241 


vir. 

AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


The title of this Discourse looks somewhat unpromising, 
It may lead the reader to expect one of those sound, 
ponderous moral treatises which edified our grand¬ 
fathers, and remind us of heavy dumpling without 
sweetmeats or suet; or it may call to his recollection a 
sermon on a special occasion preached from a Univer¬ 
sity pulpit; or it may lead him to say, ‘Here we have 
a rejected Essay from Oxford or Cambridge, only a few 
shades better than the one which carried off the prize.’ 

Some time ago we had the privilege of writing for 
1 Fraser’s Magazine ’ ‘ a Treatise on Humbug.’ To that 
essay the present one is a natural pendant. Between 
popularity and humbug there is a family likeness. 
There is a sort of moral affinity between them. Their 
colours often blend very pleasingly together, and melt 
into each other like the tints of the rainbow or the 
coruscations of the aurora borealis. Still they are not 
identical. Humbug is expressive of a more generic 
idea; it diffuses itself over a very large portion of 
rational creation ; it is a sort of self-inoculator through- 
R 


VOL. I. 



242 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


out human society. Popularity—alas ! that we should 
have to write it—is often a species or a correlative of 
humbug: it is one of the pimples and eruptions pro¬ 
duced by the inoculating matter. What the great 
Stagyrite says of the relative sciences of rhetoric and 
dialectics, is true of popularity and humbug—the one 
is a sort of offshoot of the other ; they grow up side by 
side ; ukjte (Tv/jifiatvu rrjv 'PrjTOfHicrjv oiov tt apatyvig n 
rrjg AiaXei^TLKrjg eIrai.* 

But to begin with the beginning—to commence, after 
the dialectic fashion, with the definition— What is the 
nature of Popularity ? Let it be laid down to be 1 a 
species of reputation.’ But reputations are of various 
kinds : some are lasting, while others are short-lived; 
some are based on a solid foundation, while others have 
none whatever. How is it with Popularity ? Can it 
be styled a reputation that springs out of a real cause, 
and will endure? This must be regarded as fame. 
Would any one speak of the late Duke of Wellington 
as popular? Homer, Shakspeare, Milton, Bacon, are 
famous; but it would be a piece of humour to designate 
them as popular. Would the term be applicable to 
any of our great discoverers, like Newton; or any of 
our great inventors, like Watt ? On the other hand, we 
seek for popularity among reputations of a different 
kind. Who were more loudly cheered than Father 
Gavazzi and Dr. Achilli ? For whom were more hearty 
plaudits raised than for Grimaldi, tragedian Brooke, 
and Pablo Fanque ? Barnum and Tom Thumb were 


* Arist. De Rhetor . lib. i. 2. 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


243 


celebrated characters in their day. Who have starred 
it more triumphantly than Charles Kean and Jullien ? 
Have not Tom Spring, James Ward, Dutch Sam, and 
the Tipton Slasher been the admired of all admirers ? 
Has not Sam Rogers, the horse-jockey, attained to 
greater distinction than his namesake the poet ? But 
in cases like these, observe, the reputation rests only on 
a very insecure foundation, and is of the most transient 
character. The orator may prove a frothy fool or a 
designing knave; the fiddler’s fingers may lose their 
cunning, or his catgut may be greased for the occasion; 
the singer may catch a chronic hoarseness, and the 
dancer may be stricken in the sinews of her calves ; the 
prize-fighter may be laid up with rheumatics, or his 
small modicum of brains may be knocked out; the 
horse-jockey may strain his Sartorian muscle, or break 
his neck:—then the reputation of such characters 
vanishes quietly, like smoke before a puff of wind; 
tenues evanescit in auras. Here then we arrive at the 
7roi6rrjc, or differentia of popularity. It may be defined 
as ‘ a reputation that springeth out of nothing substan¬ 
tial, and is in itself unreal and evanescent.’ Such seem 
to have been the sentiments of Lord Bacon. 4 The 
best temper of minds,’ he says, 1 desireth good name and 
true honour; the lighter, popularity and applause ; 
the more depraved, subjection and tyranny.’ And 
when Horace uses the expression 1 popularis aura, 1 he 
gives us epigrammatically his opinion of popularity and 
popular characteristics. 

Such is the metaphysical idea or logical definition of 


244 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


popularity. But metaphysicians are at a discount in 
these utilitarian times. The material sciences are in 
the ascendant, as beseemeth our gross and carnal age. 
What care we about Locke and Berkeley, and such-like 
refiners upon nothing ? Your Herapaths and Taylors 
and Brandes are the men of the situation. They can 
tell you what to eat, what to drink, and what to avoid; 
they can compound chemical ingredients for your dye¬ 
ing, your calico-printing, and the various purposes of 
trade; they can summon as witnesses into a court of 
justice poisons that have lain twelve months in a dead 
man’s stomach, and confront the murderer with the 
identical arsenic that he employed, after it has under¬ 
gone all manner of modifications in the human system. 
Talk of raising the devil!—talk of alchemy ! — talk of 
the philosopher’s stone ! These ancient dreams are 
beaten hollow by the actual achievements of our 
modern chemical professors. Now, if the physical 
sciences be so much in vogue, it is needful for us to 
bring the nature of popularity to some material test. 
This is a kind of definition unknown to logicians and 
philosophers; but in these days of chemical analysis we 
see no reason why moral characteristics should not be 
made to pass through the same ordeal of flame and fluid 
as corporeal substances. What then is popularity 
compounded, of? After experiments carefully carried 
out, we should lay it down that out of ten parts, there 
are five of coarseness, three of self-conceit, two and a- 
half of cunning, and the fraction of ordinary intellect. 
Do not expect, whoever you are, to attain any eminence 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


245 


in the popular line, unless you determine to crush 
within you all remains of refinement, modesty, and 
taste; you must boldly close with every extravagance, 
and, though it may cause you a few twinges of con¬ 
science at first, those silly qualms will soon be lulled to 
sleep in the pursuit of your lofty objects. Such seem 
to be the sentiments of my Lord Carlisle, who, amidst 
political turmoils, has ever maintained the refined and 
graceful spirit of the gentleman. ‘ Success,’ he says, 

1 after all, in nearly every walk of life, from the aspiring 
statesman to the ambitious parish beadle, unless very 
carefully watched, very anxiously chastened, is apt to 
be made up of very coarse, obtrusive, vulgar ingre¬ 
dients.’ * Have any of our readers a desire to run the 
race of popularity, and to become 1 the cynosure of neigh¬ 
bouring eyes ? ’ We hereby stake our credit that in six 
lessons, of one guinea each, we will so perfect them in the 
art that they have only to go in and win. 

But may we not get a fresh insight into the kaleido¬ 
scope of popularity by viewing it philologically ? This 
was a common mode of turning an idea inside out 
among the Academicians. We do not mean the mem¬ 
bers of the Royal Academy, but the Aristotelians. It 
is the custom now-a-days to sneer at the Stagy rite. If 
you venture to say a word in his favour, some booby 
straightway throws Bacon and his inductive system of 
philosophizing at your head. It seems singular to us 
that no friend of the ancient Greek has ever attempted 

* Address to the members of the Manchester Athenaeum, 
1846. 


246 


AN ESSAY ON POPULABITY. 


to expose the inaccuracy of much that is said in dis¬ 
paragement of his mode of reasoning. Is there so much 
opposition, after all, between the Aristotelic and Baconian 
systems, keeping in mind the nature of their subjects ? 
We are not speaking of Aristotle as dead and galvanized 
by the schoolmen of the middle ages, and made to grin 
for their amusement. This is not the man as he lived 
and taught, • though this is the only view that many 
have of him in these times. We have no wish to dis¬ 
parage the mighty mind of Lord Bacon ; but we do not 
hesitate to express our belief that he who sat beneath 
the shadow of the Academic groves was a greater phi¬ 
losopher than he who sat on the English woolsack. 

But avast,—what is the meaning of popularity, phi- 
lologically considered ? The Greek word for it would 
be drjpayojyia, answering to our ‘ demagoguism.’ The 
Latin popularitas has sometimes a similar signification. 
But how cajole that many-headed monster, the people? 
This may be done in various ways, as history, ancient 
and modern, testifies. Our old friend Aristophanes 
makes known numerous pleasant devices whereby the 
Sripayioyoi were accustomed to humbug the Athenian 
Demus; nor are those sportive practices altogether 
abandoned in the more refined society of our own times. 
Still, the most effectual instrument of the demagogue 
has been, and ever will be, that little lively member, 
the tongue. The hill on which Popularity’s proud 
temple shines afar can scarcely be ascended but by the 
aid of winged words —’eirea TTrepoevTa ; just as the dar¬ 
ing but unpractised swimmer is buoyed up by wind- 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


247 


bags, or Mr. Green by the gaseous inflation ascends in 
his balloon over the low things of earth. Let us 
endeavour to illustrate this point. 

In the popularity that is to be acquired by words and 
professions you have a fair chance of accumulating 
capital, if you adopt the political line. Your first 
object, of course, must be to flatter and cajole 'the 
people, and to persuade them that you would die in 
their behalf at a moment’s notice. Some great orators 
have withstood the impulses of their fellow-citizens; 
but, as a necessary consequence, they have not found 
favour. It would almost involve a contradiction in 
terms to suppose a man combining the characteristics of 
popularity and candour. Then, again, popularity—that 
is, the genuine article—can only be acquired by a face- 
to-face communication with the multitude. Long 
speeches are delivered in the House of Commons; but 
the members are too far removed from their constituents 
to consult very nicely their tastes. It is only in the 
prospect of an immediate parliamentary dissolution that 
any of our representatives care to manufacture orations 
ad captandum vulgus. Then, occasionally, a legislator 
manipulates and manoeuvres 1 a cry.’ Affairs begin to 
look gloomy with him; he has soon to appear before his 
constituents; he has not attempted anything to which 
he can point for applause. What is to be done ? A 
bright idea scintillates through his brain. He deter¬ 
mines to inflict a motion on the House, if only he can 
get forty members together. But what is to be the cry ? 
If a Tory, he hoists the signal of 1 The Church in dan- 


248 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY 


ger,’ or ‘ Down with Maynooth; ’ if a Liberal, he hangs 
out the banner of ‘ Parliamentary Reform,’ or the ‘ Big 
Loaf.’ By talking a vast amount of fustian, Mr. Snuf- 
fleton Huggins may gain some cheers when he returns 
to the borough of Swallowsope. But, after all, it is only 
a hybrid species of popularity that a man obtains by 
addressing his constituents through the walls of the 
House of Commons; it is like speaking through wet 
blankets. 

There are, or were, two political sections for which 
we always entertained a sincere respect; that of the 
High Tory, who disdained the name of Conservatism; 
and that of the old English Radical; both of which had 
the elements of popularity in them, and both of which 
are evanescing, or merging into each other like dissol¬ 
ving views, in these days of moderation and fusion. 
The High Tory hated everything like change; the old 
Radical hated everything as it was. Colonel Sibthorp 
was the last representative of the former class ; and we 
hardly think that the latter is represented in the House 
of Commons at all. We know that there are some as¬ 
piring young men there who call themselves Radicals, 
but it seems to be in joke. Does Radicalism walk in 
satin waistcoats and scented gloves ? Does Radicalism 
figure in purple and fine linen ? Does Radicalism smell 
of Cologne water and Macassar oil ? Does Radicalism 
patronise Stulz, and luxuriate in the boots of Hoby ? 
Does Radicalism enclose itself in cambrics and corsets ? 
Why, the puppies talk Radicalism, we presume, as an 
excellent jest. They go away from ‘the House’ to their 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


249 


ball, and tell Lady Arabella in a lisp how they have ad¬ 
vocated the cause of the ‘ great unwashed.’ Out upon 
them ! We have no patience with this finical, dandyfied, 
hypocritical Radicalism. Give me the unadulterated 
commodity; give me the Radicalism of the fustian 
jacket and hob-nailed shoes. How can a man advocate 
the rights of a Rochdale 1 Jack o’ Bill’s ’ to become a 
Member of Parliament in the accents of an affected, lisp¬ 
ing schoolgirl ? We despise this ‘ Brummagem ’ imita¬ 
tion of the real character. For shame, ye paltry loons ! 
Off with that womanish frippery, and mount a navvy’s 
coat and a wide-awake. 

Thou wear a satin vest! Doff it for shame, 

And hang a calf-skin on those recreant limbs. 

If the genuine old English Radical is to be found at 
all, it is in some of those towns in the northern counties 
that smell of oat-cake, cotton, flax, worsted, and train- 
oil. Probably fair specimens might yet be discovered 
in Manchester, Ashton-under-Lyne, Rochdale, Oldham, 
Bolton, Blackburn, and Bradford. If the old High 
Tory exists in creation, he is dreaming and vegetating 
among his bullocks and turnips somewhere in the south 
of England. Why don’t our naturalists catch a speci¬ 
men of each class, and stuff it, and deposit it in the 
Crystal Palace or British Museum for the enlightenment 
of posterity ? These types of an extinct race, methinks, 
would convey a far better lesson than your ichthyo¬ 
sauri and megatheriums, and other bygone species of 
animals with long names, about which your men of 


250 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


science deliver lectures of proportionate prosiness and 
length. 

Of the two characters, the Radical was certainly the 
more popular. The old Tory was always crying out like 
the sluggard for 1 a little more sleep and a little more 
slumber ; ’ while the Radical was always in motion- 
bustling and earnest—haranguing, planning, pulling sys¬ 
tems in pieces, like worn-out machinery, or setting them 
right side up, like so many overturned three-legged 
stools. Your Tory was a dull, stupid blockhead, by 
comparison, who cared less for applause than for his 
dinner. Your Radical was a cunning rogue; he was 
up to a trick or two in the way of popularity-hunting, 
which his opponent had not the inventiveness to strike 
out. He had been brought up under some crafty 
Old Fagin, who had instructed him carefully in the 
nimble-fingered trade of legerdemain. While John 
Bull—suppose, in the shape of some good-natured 
Mr. Brownlow—is gaping and staring about him, Ra¬ 
dicalism, in the guise of the Artful Dodger, whips 
his purse out of his pocket and disappears. 4 Holla ! ’ 
cries Mr. Brownlow, turning round in alarm and indig¬ 
nation; 4 there he is ! ’ pointing to some Tory Oliver 
Twist. 4 Stop thief! ’ is the cry, as Oliver takes to his 
heels, and a general scurry ensues. Out rushes the 
Radical Dodger from the entry, and joins vociferously 
in the pursuit. Poor Oliver is caught, and led away 
to the Bow-street station, amid thumps, and kicks, and 
abuse; while the Artful is haranguing the crowd, and 
calling heaven and earth to witness that he has cleared 



AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


251 


the streets of a knave, and is the only friend in the 
world upon whom the people can rely. 

If we had to define a true Radical, it would be as ‘ an 
animal that everlastingly grumbles.’ Ever-grumbling 
is that which distinguishes him from the rest of creation. 
All other animate beings evince emotions of satisfaction, 
in a greater or less degree, at some time or other. The 
mighty leviathans of the deep waters have occasionally 
their surly fits ; there are seasons when you would re¬ 
spectfully decline their acquaintance ; but at other times 
they have their jolly romps and morris pastimes on their 
boundless playgrounds. Would you desire a pleasanter 
sight than the huge whale, as he spouts his foam, and 
smacks his tail, and lies lazily recumbent on his el^tic 
couch, ‘ floating many a rood V Again, the crocodile 
dozing in the sun ! The rascal is as happy as a prince; 
he is dreaming of his last good dinner ; he knows no¬ 
thing of nightmares, though his first course consisted of 
an Indian damsel, bustle and bangles and all. Neither are 
the forest monsters always growling; they have their larks 
and wakes in due season; dulce est desipere in loco is 
their maxim. What alderman ever licked his lips with 
more unction than the boa constrictor after comfortably 
stowing away a fat buffalo ? He is then at peace with 
all the world. He has freely forgiven the beast for any 
resistance it had offered. The hysena has his grin of 
satisfaction as well as of discontent. The elephant is a 
noble fellow ; that merry twinkle of his small eye pro¬ 
nounces him to be a creature formed for a social party; 
he is a lover of his species—a philelephantiast. It is the 


252 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


same throughout: go through 1 Cuvier’s Animal King¬ 
dom/ and you will not find a single animate being which 
does not sometimes feel charitably disposed towards its 
kind. Now, the essential characteristic of the Radical 
is dissatisfaction with everything, with everybody, and 
on every occasion. He knows no rest, and allows no 
rest to those around him. He walks in a declamation 
fit, and sits down, as it were, ‘ on the five points.’* He 
leaves a starving family, and harangues about universal 
plenty; he is a negro-driver at home, and abroad he 
weeps over the black slave. He loves grumbling for its 
own sake. It suits his constitution; it relieves his secre¬ 
tions, mental and physical. And herein he is entitled to 
our respect: he is always consistent; you know where to 
have him. He has a universal panacea in Parliamen¬ 
tary Reform. If taxes press heavily, or his tooth twinges, 
reform is the sovereign remedy; if kingdoms fall out, or 
the corn on his big toe shoots, reform is the only specific. 
He has a vivid sense of even-handed justice; he would 
sponge the debts of the nation, and he mostly sponges 
his own. 

Probably the most perfect instances of the popular 
man might be selected from this class of aspirants. 
There have been ancient Cleons, and there are modern 
Cleons, and there will be future Cleons to the end of 
time. Can we imagine a human being much higher on 
the ladder of popularity than Henry Hunt—the high 
priest of Radical reform, the Dagon of a million un- 

* [‘The five points’ of the Charter, we presume, are here 
meant—1866.] 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


253 


satisfied Philistines—as he harangued his multitudes on 
the plains of Peterloo ? Perhaps however he ascended 
an additional step as he took the shine out of the morn¬ 
ing star of the house of Derby, at Preston, some five- 
and-twenty years ago.* And yet we fear that Orator 
Hunt, if we lay aside his coarseness and vanity, was 
but a very commonplace patriot, after all. So thinks 
lladical Bamford, at any rate, who, in the zenith of the 
orator’s glory, was at once his idolater and dupe. In- 

* [This took place some five-and-thirty years from the present 
time, when the Hon. Mr. Stanley, now Earl of Derby, was ap¬ 
pointed Chief Secretary for Ireland in Lord Grey’s Administra¬ 
tion. We happened, in early youth, to be on a visit at Preston 
when the contest took place. At a previous election, not long 
before, Mr. Stanley had excited the wrath of a bustling party by 
some withering sarcasms on their leader, whose name was ob¬ 
noxious to an unpleasant pun; he was also reported, on one 
occasion just before, to have treated the Corporation of Proud 
Preston somewhat cavalierly, by not acknowledging them when 
in their robes of office and in procession, as he was riding 
through the town in his carriage. And thus by an odd combi¬ 
nation of .circumstances he was defeated by Mr. Hunt, to the 
unutterable and unalterable disgust of his grandfather, the old 
Earl of sporting celebrity. We heard the ‘Orator’ on several 
occasions, and even then formed the opinion that he was a mere 
charlatan and humbug. He hashed up tales from Joe Miller’s 
‘ Jest Book,’ and attached them to ‘ young Stanley.’ In one, we 
remember—neither the most delicate in itself, nor the most de¬ 
licately told—where an old lady wearing an antediluvian garment 
excites an antiquarian’s curiosity, he made this ‘sprig of no¬ 
bility’ a chief actor. It answered its purpose, however: it threw 
ridicule on his opponent, and created merriment among a very 
promiscuous crowd of men and women.— 1866 .] 


254 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


deed, the popular man, as we have shown, must always 
have a strong admixture of coarseness and selfishness 
in his composition; and not the least, we fear, is this 
the case with the popular Radical. We must speak the 
truth, even of those we respect. ‘ My dear sir,’ was the 
address of some well-disposed persons to an aged man 
who had accumulated wealth to no useful purpose; 1 My 
dear sir, do something, we beg of you, for posterity.’ 
< Posterity! ’ was his exclamation,—‘ posterity be hanged. 
What has posterity ever done for me, I should like to 
know ? ’ Now we would lay a guinea to a shilling— 
a five-pound note to a China orange—that that man had 
spouted Radicalism in an ale-house, refused church- 
rates, denounced tithes, insulted the clergyman, brawled 
in a Board of Guardians, swaggered among Common 
Councilmen, catechized a candidate at the hustings, and 
been on the whole a popular man. 

Circumscribing our range of vision, we discover how 
word-begotten popularity may thrive within the arena 
of a borough Council Chamber. Mr. Ephraim Rasher- 
ham is a provision-dealer, and his shop is celebrated for 
Kendal butter and Melton Mowbray pork-pies. His 
wife attends chiefly to the business department in life, 
and he to the oratorical; and both departments are well 
managed. His friends say that he ought to have been 
a Member of Parliament, and that he would have as¬ 
tonished the House—in which latter assertion some of 
his opponents agree. He has always been a chairman 
of a district committee at the borough election, and has 
gathered fresh laurels on each occasion. At public 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


255 


meetings he has occasionally gained a hearing, and ‘ ful- 
mined’ over the assembled crowd. And now he has 
attained to the dignity of a town councillor, after a 
contest of unprecedented severity, and a profuse expen¬ 
diture of oratory and porter, of magnificent promises 
and noggins of rum. We are not quite sure whether 
he is a Liberal or a Conservative in politics; he says 
he is independent of all party, and has but one object, 
the welfare of the people in general; he professes even 
an indifference 

To popularity, or stars, or strings, 

The mob’s applauses or the gifts of kings. 

And yet he is generally found on the most oratori¬ 
cal side of a question ; he sees at a glance which phase 
of the argument best admits of rounded periods and ses- 
quipedalia verba, and he regulates his course accord¬ 
ingly. How he overflows with eloquence on the burst¬ 
ing of a water-pipe ! How he fumes in rounded periods 
at an escape of gas! But his greatest achievement hither¬ 
to was on a late occasion when he proposed a resolution 
in council, that, if baby perambulators were allowed on 
the flagged causeway, it was but justice to the poor that 
hand coal-waggons should be also. He commenced as 
popular orators usually do, with strong asseverations of 
his own disinterestedness and love of fair dealing, and re¬ 
ferred to many confirmations of this assertion in the re¬ 
cords of his past life. He related with much grief of 
heart that a policeman had, before his eyes, permitted 
two well-dressed nursemaids to pass along the causeway 


256 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


each with a perambulator, and that immediately after 
he had threatened to take a poor girl to the lock-up 
who was dragging in a hand-cart a little sister in place 
of coals. Here several common councillors went out 
to a neighbouring tavern to take a little refreshment, 
knowing that they would be in time to vote on their 
return,—one of them lighting his pipe, observing with 
a sagacious wink, ‘ Ephraim’s the boy’, and never ut¬ 
tering another word till he rose to return. Ephraim 
then, following the approved fashion of public speakers, 
rushed into the ocean of statistics, and, like the levia¬ 
than, took his pastime therein for awhile. He proved 
that a poor man’s baby and a rich man’s baby are 
physically equal; he examined the question ethno- 
logically, and showed that since the creation there has 
been a unity of structure in the human species. He 
then rose to the higher considerations of moral, intel¬ 
lectual, and legal equality; he threw in a flourish about 
infants born under the gilded dome of the palace, and 
those which first saw the light under the thatched roof 
of the cottage ; and he closed his speech with a perora¬ 
tion on the magnificence of even-handed justice, sitting 
down amidst vociferous applause, not the least from his 
friends who had just returned from the tavern power¬ 
fully refreshed with beer. Ephraim is largely reported 
in the Saturday’s ‘ Independent; ’ he is the subject of 
much commendation —volutans vivus per ora virum ; 
his shop is patronised by his admirers; his business 
flourishes; and altogether he is far the most popular 
person in the borough, not even excepting the Radical 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


257 


member, who has acquired a fair amount of character 
by promising everything and performing nothing. 

But here the expression ‘ popular preacher ’ suggests 
itself. Sooth to say, we do not much love the term— 
the idea gathers round it many ludicrous and some un¬ 
pleasing images. Of popular preachers there are many 
species. Some choose the sentimental, cambric-hand¬ 
kerchief line, and quote much poetry, or rather the 
same poetry often, about 1 infants clinging to their 
mothers’ breasts.’ We are acquainted with one good- 
looking fellow, with his curly hair parted in front of his 
forehead, who made his fortune out of a single verse 
from the writings of Mrs. Barbauld. He made his 
fortune in every sense, for he laid up an abundant stock 
of popularity, and he married a rich wife. We have 
known some get on remarkably well in the high Cal- 
vinistic line, rising in estimation the more fiercely they 
scattered damnation around them. In the race of popu¬ 
larity we would almost back that ugly black-muzzled 
tyke, with his grisly hair stroked over his forehead, and 
the pupils of his eyes lost under their lids, and with a 
general physiognomy suggestive of the Old Bailey, 
againstyour sleek-faced, Macassar-oiled, kid-gloved sprig, 
who mixes up religion and love ditties. In the favours 
of the fair sex, the handsome youth has but a few 
minutes’ start of his dear ugly brother. Your Puseyite 
preacher has a select species of popularity. He wraps 
himself in mysticisms and cultivates abstractions; and 
he is popular with those who profess to be wiser than 
their fellows, and to be able to understand him. The 

VOL. I. S 


258 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


young ladies too have a fondness for his scenic exhibi¬ 
tions, and cast penetrating glances even through his 
double-breasted silken waistcoat. In that popularity 
however which springs out of words he never attains 
much eminence. He is a believer in the Horatian pre¬ 
cept— 

Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem, 

Quam quse sunt oculis subjecta fidelibus, et quae 

Ipse sibi tradit spectator.* 

These are several species of the popular preacher. 
View him however generically ; take a glance at him 
in his abstractions. He must be a man of extreme 
opinions on some point, and he must have a dash of 
coarseness in his mode of making them known. Popu¬ 
larity and refinement of expression are neutralistic. 
We recollect an aged clergyman who was accustomed 
to give this advice to his young friends in the ministry : 
—‘ Always remember,’ he used to say, ‘ that there are 
some persons of sound sense in every congregation : 
preach to them.’ If you wish to be popular, adopt the 
converse of this advice. 1 Forget that any members of 
your congregation are men of good taste: preach to the 
vulgar.’ Take up an anti-something theory, and go at 
it like a Stentor. No matter whether you thunder in 
church, chapel, or conventicle, you must keep in view 
the necessity of combativeness. Your strong point may 
be anti-Popery, or anti-Protestantism, or anti-Puseyism, 
or anti-Dissent, or anti-Church-corruptions, or anti- 


* Ars Poet. 180. 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


259 


tobacco-pipes-and-cigars, or anti-alcoholic-drinks: any 
will do for the nonce. Speak with a loud voice, and 
thump with a heavy hand. ‘ Split the ears of the ground¬ 
lings ’ without mercy. The big drum is always the 
most popular instrument in the band. Then if the 
pulpit begins to fail, take to the platform, as the high¬ 
wayman of old took to the road, and at the point of the 
blunderbuss demand the applause of the crowd., The 
platform allows greater latitude of expression than the 
pulpit, without the liability to ecclesiastical censure^ 
and more absurd assertions without the probability of 
their being examined, and a more determined stamping 
of the foot without the fear of sinking through the boards, 
and more violent gesticulations without the danger of 
grimacing delicate females into fits. It was said by the 
cynic Heraclitus that he valued the opinion of one man 
of common sense more than that of multitudes beyond 
number besides. 

Els e/tol avOpunos Tpia/Avpioi , ol S’ avapiOfwi 

OlSeis. 

A very childish sentiment—if, that is, you wish to be 
popular—as foolish as that of the Athenian orator who, 
when loudly cheered, asked a bystander what puerile 
opinion he had expressed. The conceited fellow deserved 
to be ostracised. As for you, enunciate clap-traps with 
a confident air, and elicit applause, the more the better. 
See that your name is plentifully placarded in large 
and flaming letters upon every dead wall and conspi¬ 
cuous gable-end. Popularity, platforms, and placards 


260 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


are not only alliterative, but allied. Your Irish¬ 
man is generally a handy boy at this practice. He is 
pugnacious by nature, not with any bad intent, but 
simply for the fun of the thing. As was said of the 
winged minister of Jove’s thunder, his mercurial tem¬ 
perament and native vigour urge him into battles. 

Nunc in reluctantes dracones 
• Egit amor dapis atque pugnae.* 

His perfervidum ingenium impels him into conflicts, no 
matter whether with the shillelagh or the tongue. Like 
Tony Lumpkin, he ‘ loves a row ; ’ neither is he ham¬ 
pered with silly sensibilities. He has the two requisites 
for popularity given by Archbishop Whately—fluency 
and puzzleheadedness. 

A sort of man (says the Archbishop), that is not only much 
talked of, but commonly admired, is a man who, along with a 
considerable degree of clearness and plausible fluency, is what is 
called puzzleheaded—destitute of sound, clear, cautious judg¬ 
ment. This puzzleheadedness conduces much to a very sudden 
and rapid rise to a short-lived celebrity.f 

It is true that there are those who have a claim to 
popularity on other than viva voce pretensions. We 
might enumerate the novelist, whose popularity lies in 
his grand descriptions and melodramatic situations; 
and the dancer, whose popularity lies in her muscular 
elasticity; and the singer, whose popularity lies in her 
windpipe ; and the actress, whose popularity lies in her 

* Hor. Odes, b. iv. 4-11. 

f Annotations to Bacon’s Essay Of Honour and Reputation. 


AN ESSAY ON POPULABITY. 


261 


appropriate contortions and becoming grimaces ; and a 
score of other classes whose popularity has its origin in 
certain peculiar characteristics. Let thus much, how¬ 
ever, suffice in explanation of the nature - the tl tar tv — 
of popularity. Following the approved method of the 
ancient philosophers, we proceed now to investigate this 
problem —How far is popularity a thing to he desired ? 

That popularity is agreeable no one can deny: at 
least, should anyone be rash enough to do so, regard 
him as a person unworthy of credit. It is classed by 
Aristotle among the ‘things pleasant.’ Kut to Qavpa£tadat 
ijdv Si* a vto to Ti/j-ciffdai.* Even that old rascal who 
lived in a tub, and pretended to despise such vanities, 
only showed his love of them after his own fashion. 

Man, and no less woman, may be defined to be a vain 
animal. Vanity is a universal characteristic. It has 
ever been a theory of ours that all men are equally vain, 
and that the apparent difference among them consists 
simply in the faculty of concealing the weakness. Here 
we see a giddy jackanapes strutting up and down, like 
a peacock as it stretches its neck and spreads its tail in 
the sun, and courting the flattery of every .simpleton 
who comes across his path ; here we meet with a surly 
mastiff of a fellow, who would snap off your nose, or 
pretend to do so, if you offered him a compliment. 
And after all, we have a suspicion that the one specimen 
of human nature has as much conceit in it as the other. 
The preacher harangues against vanity, while his jewelled 


* Arist. Bhet. i. 11, § 18. 


262 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


fingers glitter forth the sad truth that it is his own fail¬ 
ing. The moralist gravely lectures us against the love 
of popularity, while every paragraph betrays his own. 
Dr. Parr, as he smoked his pipe of defiance against all 
conventionalities in the presence of George III., evinced 
his own personal autocracy and petty self-conceit. 
Neither is it ordinary mortals only who exhibit their 
vanity. Read the autobiographies of our eminent men. 
What are they but melancholy confessions of this weak¬ 
ness? Aristotle is supposed to have been a puppy; 
Alcibiades was a coxcomb ; Cicero was an egotist; the 
Admirable Crichton was a swaggerer; Nelson was his 
own idol; Erskine was a childish boaster; Southey in¬ 
flated himself with his own self-importance, as naturally 
as the crib-biting horse fills itself with wind. On the 
whole, therefore, it maybe laid down that all men in their 
secret hearts are equally vain, or nearly so, but that all 
men are not equally discreet. Listen to that fellow 
whose tongue tinkles eternally like the bell of a com¬ 
mercial room ; at every fresh jingle he is proclaiming 
his private opinion of himself, while that quiet sarcastic 
looking man opposite to him has no intention whatever 
that others should examine his private thoughts as if he 
were a lantern, though the candle of self-importance 
may be burning more brightly in him than in his neigh¬ 
bour. Our susceptibility to flattery is a mark of our 
innate vanity. Is there any man living insensible to the 
perfumed incense. ‘ Flattering unction ’ may be a more 
poetical expression than * soft sawder,’ but the name 
matters little ; if the emollient be laid on with reason- 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


263 


able tact, it cannot fail to give pleasure. 1 Flattery 
pleases very generally,’ said Dr. Johnson. 1 In the first 
place the flatterer may think what he says to be true; 
but in the second place, whether he thinks so or not, he 
certainly thinks those whom he flatters of consequence 
enough to be flattered.’* 

If we regard this intuitive love of popularity in its 
final cause, we shall see that it is not implanted without 
a wise purpose. The stoical nil admirari f system of 
morals was essentially a vile one. It was nothing less 
than an effort to reduce human beings, made up of flesh 
and blood and mind, into stocks and stones, or at best 
into vegetables. It strove after the extinction of every 
feeling that could incite men to a course of honourable 
ambition. We do not think much indeed of that love 
of popularity which feeds solely on ‘ the most sweet 
voices ’ of a mob; we are now supposing a species in 
which there is a mixture of some purer ingredient. 
Such a love of popularity may often lead us wrong; 
but without it we could rarely go right. It has its uses 
as well as its abuses. Many mighty deeds have origin¬ 
ated in this feeling ; and when an adventurous gentleman 
has 1 plucked bright honour from the pale-faced moon,’ 
he may employ this acquisition for the good of his 
fellow-creatures. The popular preacher, the popular 
statesman, the popular writer, the popular common 
councillor—each has obtained that moral leverage which 
the ancient mathematician desired physically—the irov 


* Boswell’s Life. 


f Hor. Epis. i. 6-1. 


264 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


ffruj —and may lift, if not the world, some portion of it, 
out of the slough of ignorance, or error, or evil. 

And have we not an illustration of our subject brought 
to our very door at the time we write ? Manchester is 
at this moment 1 drunk with enthusiasm’—as it is some¬ 
times said of popular toasts. Lord and Lady Palmerston 
are to-day leaving the metropolis of cotton, carrying 
away with them the good wishes of the citizens, and, 
we trust, pleasant memories of their own. We would 
wager a trifle that my Lord and Lady have had more 
hand-shaking to do this last week than in any twelve 
months of their previous life ; but we understand they 
went through it with an affability and courtesy which 
won the hearts of our people.* 

It is not every man in Lord Palmerston’s station, and 
at his age, who would come down to Manchester as a 
recreation. Many a younger person would think it no 
trifle to pass through the inevitable process of sight¬ 
seeing, speech-making, hand-shaking, banqueting, that 
awaits an eminent visitor. We are informed that his 
Lordship was at home, and spoke effectively in answer 
to addresses from town councils and commercial associa¬ 
tions ; and if he did not quite answer expectation in his 
speech to the members of the Mechanics’ Institute, it 
must be remembered that he appeared before them on 
the evening of a long and to him wearisome day. 
Neither was his Lordship aware probably of the kind 
of men whom he would have to address. Many of them, 


* [October, 1856.—1866.] 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


265 


young warehousemen and mechanics of the higher class, 
are very shrewd and intelligent, and have attained to a 
fair degree of literary proficiency. The faculty of ex¬ 
temporaneous speaking too is rated among them at a 
high value—higher than it deserves; and is cultivated 
to some extent in their Mutual Improvement Societies 
and Literary Institutions. They are, on the whole, a 
somewhat critical class. 

Why, let us ask, do great people come down to Man¬ 
chester ill-dressed '! Is it that they may be consistent 
with the place ? It is true that, as a whole, we are not 
a well-dressed class here; nay, we have seen a man 
worth a million swathed in clothes which might have 
been the sweepings of a pawn shop. But that is no 
reason why gentlemen who are ordinarily well-dressed 
should, on entering our city, assume an old coat and a 
shocking bad hat. The Queen rode through our streets 
in what seemed to be a black stuff gown ; and Lord 
Palmerston, we were told, walked through the Exhibi¬ 
tion of the Mechanics’ Institute in a hat of many inden¬ 
tations, and a costume of Jewish aspect. Why should 
his Lordship, the beau ideal of fashion, show himself 
among us in a rusty coat of invisible green ? 

Lord Palmerston is a good instance of the better style 
of popular man. He is not a favourite beyond all reason, 
but he is nevertheless a general favourite of the nation. 
He does not seem to have sought the good opinion of 
the people by any of those mean and slavish tricks 
which your intensely popular man employs. He has 
not, certainly, been without his errors and weaknesses; 


266 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


but he is no ordinary man who for half a century can 
fill responsible offices in the Government of our country, 
ever moving onwards, and standing at an advanced age 
higher in position and popular estimation than he has 
ever been before. The secret of his success probably 
lies in his undaunted spirit. An Englishman always 
likes to see an exhibition of ‘pluck;’ and this is a 
quality which Lord Palmerston has ever manifested, and 
not the least during the last few years.* 

But to return. This love of popularity too forms a 

* [In illustration of the subject treated of above, Lord 
Palmerston may be regarded as a study. He is an instance, 
almost unparalleled, of popularity not only sustained, but 
increasing over a long life. For the greater part of sixty years 
he held an official position—that severe test of opinion; and 
yet he gradually rose higher and higher in the estimation of his 
countrymen, till at the age of eighty-two they accorded to him 
their all but universal good-will, and on his removal their all 
but universal regret. Neither was this produced by anything 
adventitious. Men who have died in the hour of victory have 
naturally received posthumous honours and applause in unusual 
measure. The melancholy death of Sir Robert Peel created 
throughout the nation a more than ordinary excitement in his 
favour. The unexpected removal of the Prince Consort opened 
more widely, in proportion to its suddenness, the floodgates of 
mourning. But in Lord Palmerston we have one who was 
neither taken away in the hour of some great achievement, 
nor by accident, nor by rapid disease; his life in the course of 
nature could not have been prolonged many years; his death 
might have been expected any month; and yet his depar¬ 
ture was attended with sincere and general sorrow; and men 
are now looking into the future of their country with some mis¬ 
givings, as though a pillar had been removed which tended to 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY '. 


267 


sort of connecting link between the present and the 
future. It is very true that the celebrity of most men 

sustain its prosperity and welfare. How are we to account for 
this? We answer, Lord Palmerston was the embodiment of 
those characteristics which Englishmen most admire. His 
intellectual powers were by nature of a high order, and these 
were enlarged and matured by long experience. We doubt 
whether his gifts of mind have been sufficiently acknowledged in 
the tributes which have been paid to his memory. Though not 
a fluent speaker, he was eminently a lucid one. What a mar¬ 
vellous example of clear statement on an entangled subject was 
his explanation in the House of Commons on the Schleswig- 
Holstein complications—and that at the age of eighty! Then 
how adroitly could he parry Disraeli’s passes, and after doing so 
how effectively could he deliver his retaliatory thrusts ! He had 
a ready store of humour too, without which no one can be truly 
popular among us. He had not Canning’s wit—which keen- 
edged weapon was in truth his bane—but he had the more genial 
command of drollery and pleasant jest. His manner also was 
frank, honest, and without affectation. A man, though Premier, 
he said, need not be * stiff as a poker.’ Your reticent politician, 
like the late Sir Eobert Peel, may be admired in his measures, 
but personally he cannot be popular. An Englishman, moreover, 
loves an undaunted spirit that will confront difficulties and 
dangers without shrinking ; and Lord Palmerston had conspicu¬ 
ously this property. Whether dealing with a mighty nation or 
an individual member of the House of Commons, he could give 
and take without flinching; he entered with zest into a fair 
stand-up fight, and if he was sometimes hit hard he generally 
administered more punishment than he received. And in all his 
doings he appeared to have, and we doubt not really had, the 
prosperity and dignity of his country at heart. Though easy in 
joining successive Administrations, he was always true to his 
party; he would never give up a friend; he would stand or fall 
with the colleagues by his side. He was a man of moderate 


268 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


dies before them; but they do not themselves think that 
it will. How many thousand deluded mortals have ap¬ 
pealed to the wisdom and justice of posterity, and been 
forgotten ! ‘ I protest! I appeal! ’ said Henry Hunt to 
the late Lord Ellenborough, after an adverse decision. 

4 Very well, Mr. Hunt,’ was the reply ; 1 protest, appeal, 
and go about your business.’ So Time, that great 
Lord Chief-Justice, deals with the multitude. It bids 
them protest and appeal, and go about their business. 
Third-rate poets, politicians, novelists, orators, all flatter 
themselves with the idea that they will be appreciated 
by posterity : when Old Time, after allowing such cha¬ 
racters to delude themselves for awhile, sends them, with 
their productions, about their business. The man who 
plants a birch tree has a fairer claim to look confi-. 
dently and cheeringly forward as likely to make an im¬ 
pression on posterity, than he who writes an epic poem. 
Still this vain hope binds men to the future. Cicero 
introduces this fondness for posthumous reputation, as an 
argument for the soul’s immortality. 4 But the most 
powerful argument is, that nature herself gives a silent 

opinions also. The demagogue mostly outlives his popularity ; 
extreme opinions are generally found to have flaws in the long 
run, as well as those who hold them; and the English tone of 
thought and feeling is, as a rule, steady and well balanced. We 
suspect that even with many of our advanced political orators, 
their hearts are by no means so hotly enamoured of change as 
their tongues would represent. We do not doubt, therefore, that 
the more you analyse Lord Palmerston’s character, the more 
you will find that it embodies those distinctive qualities which, 
as Englishmen, we naturally admire and love.—1866.] 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


269 


judgment in favour of the soul’s immortality ; inasmuch 
as all are especially anxious about what will take place 
after their death. 11 Man plants trees for the good of a 
succeeding age,” as Statiussaysinhis“Synephebi.” With 
what view, except that he has an interest in posterity ? 
What mean the procreation of a family, the founding of 
a name, the adoption of children, the care about wills, 
the very inscriptions on monuments, and elogies, but 
that we have an eye to the future ? ’* Strangely enough, 
however, this longing for. fame after death has been 
known to exist in some who professed to disbelieve in 
the immortality of the soul. David Hume derived con¬ 
siderable satisfaction in his last days from the pre¬ 
science of his increasing fame. 1 What is to be said but 
vanity of vanities,’ writes an Edinburgh Reviewer on 
this subject, ‘ when a philosopher, who has no expecta¬ 
tion of a future state, and who is contemplating annihi¬ 
lation with complacency, is found, notwithstanding this, 
busied on his death-bed about his posthumous fame, 
careful what men may be saying of his essays and his 


* Maximum vero argumentnm est, naturam ipsam de immor- 
talitate animorum taeitam judicare, quod omnibus curse sunt, et 
maxime quidem, quse post mortem futura sint. Sent arbores, 
qua alteri sceculo prosint, ut ait Statius in St/nephebis ; quid 
spectans, nisi etiam postera ssecula ad se pertinere? Ergo 
arbores sent diligens agricola, quarum adspiciet baccam ipse 
nunquam. Vir magnus leges, instituta, rempublicam non serit ? 
Quid procreatio liberorum, quid propagatio nominis, quid adopti¬ 
ons filiorum, quid testamentorum diligentia, quid ipsa sepulcro- 
rum monumenta, quid elogia significant, nisi nos futura etiam 
cogitare?— Tusc. Disput. i. 14. 


270 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


histories, after he himself is sleeping in the grave, 
where all things are forgotten V * By the way, how do 
Dr. Cumming and his followers regard popularity ? 
According to their calculations the world has only some 
ten years longer to last. Then popularity, unpopu¬ 
larity, and the absence of popularity, will be all the 
same. People will not then purchase the publications 
of Dr. Cumming, nor refer to him as a great divine of 
the past. At this moment the Doctor has accumulated 
a fair amount of capital in the merchandise of popularity ; 
but in his computation the investment is terminable in 
ten years. Does the reverend interpreter of apocalyptic 
visions still persist in entering into leases, begetting sons 
and daughters, reserving the copyright of his writings, 
and coaxing a prospective fame, when, in another decade, 
by his chronology, ‘ the cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous 
palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself,’ and 
Dr. Cumming’s reputation with it, will pass away like 
a dream, and ‘ leave not a rack behind ’? 

It was the practice of the ancient philosophers to say, 
A wise man, or a good man, is a king, according as they 
held their summum bonum to be wisdom or goodness. 
Now, a popular man, we maintain, is for the time being 
a king. He exercises royal functions. Was there ever 
a more undeniable monarch than Henry Hunt as he 
harangued his mobs in the hey-day of his glory ? Did 
not Daniel O’Connell assume the symbols of royalty on 
some hill-side in Ireland, and feel himself to be ‘ every 

* Edinburgh Review , January, 1847. Article on David Hume. 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


271 


inch a king ’ ? Did not Feargus O’Connor frighten all 
London from its propriety by unfurling his regal banner 
one fine day near the Houses of Parliament ? And if 
we leave the hill-sides and plains, and enter our draw¬ 
ing-rooms, we shall observe how the sovereignty of the 
popular man is exercised over a more select circle. 
When such authors as Scott, or Moore, or Wordsworth, 
or Southey, came to the metropolis from their rustic 
retreats, we read that they were saluted with royal 
honours over tea and toast. Could the vanity of man 
have received a higher compliment than to be pointed 
at as the lion of the day by fat dowagers and beflounced 
spinsters in West-end saloons? 

In popularity, as thus exhibited, there must be some¬ 
thing peculiarly intoxicating; we have ourselves seen 
how frail mortals can sip down draughts of adulation 
with their hyson. The authority of a sovereign is no¬ 
where more distinctly observable than when a popular 
preacher is the presiding deity at a tea-party of his 
followers. How that unctuous, greasy, sensuous Metho¬ 
dist parson munches his muffins and turns up his eyes, 
while all the members of the party munch muffins and 
turn up their eyes in sympathy! How he groans out 
of his full paunch and wheezy throat, after the tray has 
been removed, and how all groan in concert! Nor is 
there less autocracy exercised here and there by a 
clergyman of our church. We well remember our 
juvenile visits to an aunt who resided in a populous 
town, and was held there very deservedly in high esti¬ 
mation. We expected a small fortune from the old lady; 


272 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


but,peace to her ashes! she left three-fourths of her pro¬ 
perty for the conversion of Jews and Hottentots. Well, 
she used to give a large tea-party at a stated season to those 
friends who were members of the same congregation 
as herself; and her pastor—a man of great popularity 
in the place—conducted the proceedings of the evening. 
We have a perfect recollection of the favourite, of his 
patronizing smile, his affected humility, his self-compla¬ 
cent demeanour, and of his long exposition of Scripture, 
while the ladies sat in a semicircle, wrapt in delectable 
admiration. Every action and expression of the com¬ 
pany were in deferential homage to the popular idol, 
and he in return sniffed up, apparently as his due, the 
idolatrous incense. We received a long lecture from 
aunt after the party had broken up, because we yawned 
at intervals throughout the evening, and had set one or 
two others yawning; and we have a shrewd suspicion 
that a very natural question we put to her on the fol¬ 
lowing day—Who that ugly, disagreeable man was ?— 
lost us a handsome legacy. 

Thus far we have seen popularity in its brightest 
colours ; let us turn it round, and examine it on its 
darker side. It does not follow, observe, that because 
it is desired, it is therefore, per se, desirable. It has its 
abuses as well as its uses, its dangers as well as its 
dignities, its anxieties as well as its pleasures. Man, 
we have seen, is a vain animal; but it is a problem to 
our mind, whether there is more enjoyment or pain 
in a spirit of vanity. It is no doubt agreeable to hear 
our own praises; but in proportion as you enjoy a com- 


AN ESSAY ON POPTJLABITY. 


273 


pliment, with so much the more acuteness will you feel 
the sting of mortified self-conceit. We are inclined to 
think that this love of popular distinction ought to be 
kept in due bounds, if life is to be spent in rational 
contentment. If we could have penetrated beneath the 
self-complacent smile, and patronizing air, and well-fed 
stomach of our aunt’s clerical favourite, perhaps we 
should have found the inscription on his heart, 1 Pity 
the sorrows of a popular man !’ 

There are probably few sources of truer enjoyment 
for the time, than the delivery of a successful speech 
before an educated audience. There is perhaps no 
higher honour than the homage of a listening or ap¬ 
plauding senate. But the best orators often fail, or 
come short of men’s expectations. 1 Ah ! Tinkertrope 
did not come up to the mark to-day; his speech was 
stale and flat; he was at a loss for words as well as 
argument; he must make a better hit the next time, if 
he is to keep up his popularity.’ These remarks soon 
reach the ears of the Bight Hon. Augustus Tinkertrope ; 
and what tumultuous feelings do they excite within 
him! He shakes hands with his friends, blandly smiling, 
and he goes home straightway to abuse his wife and bully 
his servants. Old Dunderstone, the county member, 
who never spoke three grammatical sentences consecu¬ 
tively in his life, and whose talk is of bullocks, is the 
happier man of the two. Then in those cases of great 
failure which frequently occur, who can conceive the 
misery that attends them ? When Sheridan first essayed 
to rise into the region of oratory and collapsed, he rushed 

VOL. i. T 


274 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


for relief doubtless to the brandy bottle. When Disraeli 
sat down amidst jeers and laughter, the pangs of Prome¬ 
theus were within him. 

We were once on an oratorical tour with two com¬ 
panions, and had an opportunity of observing how 
critical and delicate a thing is popularity, or the love of 
popularity, in its influence on human happiness. Our 
part of the daily performance was a very insignificant 
one : it extended no further than vociferating 1 hear ! 
hear!’ when nothing was said worth hearing, and in 
cheering with great vehemence when the speakers were 
at fault or talking nonse.nse. Exercising our freedom, 
therefore, we had a sort of cruel amusement in tickling 
the self-complacence or stinging the vanity of each 
speaker after the proceedings of the evening; and it 
was curious to observe how a presumed success or failure 
in their oratory soothed or soured their tempers for the 
night. One evening, for instance, an old woman, who 
had evidently been drinking, fell asleep among the 
audience, toppled backwards over her seat, and awoke 
with a loud shriek : afterwards, we had no difficulty in 
persuading the speaker that it was his eloquence which 
had overpowered her. It is unquestionably a matter 
of great doubt how far the aggregate of individual hap¬ 
piness is increased by personal popularity; indeed, we 
have a private opinion that a very interesting novel 
might be written under the title, The Miseries of a 
Popular Man , in which our hero might be exhibited in 
all the trying positions and unhappy conjunctures which 
must ever fall to the lot of a celebrated character. We 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


275 


commend the hint to the consideration of the Right Hon. 
Benjamin Disraeli. 

A popular character resembles very much the man 
or woman who dances on a tight-rope. The more the 
spectators applaud, the more energetic must be the 
dancer; and often when everything is going on briskly, 
and portending a shower of coppers, down plumps the 
unfortunate acrobat, and is greeted with more jeers than 
half-pence. ‘ Popular applause,’ asks an old writer, 
‘ is it not like smoke, which the higher it mounteth the 
sooner it vanisheth ? ’* All history illustrates the slip¬ 
pery footing on which the popular man moves. Look 
no further back than the last fifty years, and no further 
round than our own country, and you will find that 
every idol of the people has fallen from its pedestal and 
been smashed to pieces like the Dagon of the Philistines. 
Henry Hunt and William Cobbett died neglected, after 
a myriad throats had become hoarse with cheering their 
tomfooleries. Feargus O’Connor, poor fellow, sunk into 
a nonentity, and his schemes perished at Snig’s-end. 
And if you are anxious to point a moral, contemplate the 
career of Daniel O’Connell to its close. Probably Dan 
was a more popular character, and retained his popu¬ 
larity longer, than any recorded in history, ancient or 
modern. But the day of gloom and misfortune came at 
last. The Nemesis he had long driven off seized him 
at length with a firm gripe. After spending a lifetime 
in exciting and guiding the passions of a nation that 


Disce Moris, § 35. 
t 2 


276 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


idolized him, he was outstripped by younger and more 
ardent spirits, and he sank into the grave a heart-broken 
and neglected old man. And now how little is remem¬ 
bered of that full, deep-toned, diapason voice, which 
awoke tears or laughter at the speaker’s will ! Is not 
his monument yet unfinished, on the very scene where 
his triumphal car once rolled royally along ? Poor Dan ! 
his career illustrates the fickleness of popular favour 
more strikingly than all the biographies put together of 
our early friend, Cornelius Nepos. Alas ! the figures of 
men mighty in words sweep along and pass from our 
gaze like shadows on the hill-sides. How long will it 
be before the Rev. Mr. Spurgeon is superseded as premier 
preacher of England ? Well, it is of no avail to moralize : 
men pick pockets in sight of the gallows, and men will 
hazard their lives for celebrity, while the smashed, bat¬ 
tered, shipwrecked hulls of many a tall vessel that once 
was borne onward by the popular breeze, are rolling 
water-logged before them down the stream of life. 

Neither must we quite ignore the reflection, that the 
man driven onward by the popular hurricane, some¬ 
times impinges on the breakwater of our laws. An 
occasional Cufley* is landed on Norfolk Island at Her 
Majesty’s expense, hurried forward by the gales of a 
people’s applause; a patriot who loves his country, not 

* [A high-spirited, patriotic tailor, of very diminutive propor¬ 
tions, who, when in the dock for his participation in the Chartist 
riots some ten or twelve years ago, demanded in a loud tone and 
with theatrical action to be tried before a jury of his peers. 
Unhappily the enthusiastic little fellow was transported.—1866.] 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


277 


wisely, but too well, is here and there found domesticating 
with kangaroos in Australia; a spirited gentleman who 
has led on a vociferous crowd with musket and banner, 
is now and then put to work in those unpleasant restric¬ 
tions on free labour called fetters, and seen perambulating 
in close vincular association with Cracksman Bob; a 
casual youth, too aspiring to live, has to pay his respects 
to that mysterious personage who haunts assize towns 
with a suspicious-looking cord in his pocket. By all 
means shun that species of popularity which is likely to 
bring you into conflict with the growling monster called 
Law; rather join Don Quixote in a tilt at the windmill. 
In the height of your aspirations after renown, never 
forget that there is an everlasting ladder called a tread- 
wheel : remember Botany Bay and the crank.* 

* [Is not history re-producing itself, as we write, and exhibit¬ 
ing to us, in these Stephenses, O’Learys, Lubys, O’Donovans, and 
O’Connells, of the Fenian order, a class of men who are too 
patriotic to be at large ? It would be as useless to argue with 
such fiery and dashing spirits as it would be with a flash of 
lightning. Your Irishman’s nature is his own, and no one’s else. 
Transplant him where you will, and it remains. If Horace’s 
maxim be true generally, ‘ Ccelum, non animum, mutant qui 
trans mare currunt,’ it is especially so of the son of Erin. 
He is lively, and loves a skirmish; he is not particularly 
enamoured of work; he has the gift of fluent speech; he has 
been so long told that he is an ill-used man that he fully believes 
it, though few rational people can see how he is ill-used except 
by himself. He is fond of large schemes for giving freedom to 
his native land, which gradually expand by inflation, and at 
length blow up, when they are found to have contained, with 
some genuine ingredients, a vast store of trickery, deception, 


278 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


We have our fears too that popularity is sometimes 
misused by its possessor. Patriots are but men, and 
‘ young men must live.’ Even orators who applaud the 
self-sacrifice of Quintus Curtius, love money and power. 
And this trade in popularity may bring for a time a fair 
return of creature comforts. Modern history would 
supply us with a few examples of men who have grown 
fat and jolly on their windy, jaw-rattling profession. 
Did not Wilkes—who, by the way, was never in his 
palmiest days soft enough to be a Wilkite—wisely re¬ 
tire from business as agitator, and step into a corporation 
office ? A friend of ours once stopped in a crowded 
London thoroughfare, and began to look earnestly up to 
the third-storey window of a house close by: a crowd 
gathered round him, every one looking up with the 
same intentness as himself; when he slipped away, and 
left about a hundred people staring at nothing. So 
dexterously does your artful popularity-hunter now and 
then carry out his schemes. 

Unfortunately however, as a rule, a love of popularity 
is insatiable. It grows by what it feeds on. The thirst 
of notoriety is more difficult to allay than the thirst of 
avarice. It cries out unceasingly, with the horse-leech, 

4 Give ! give ! ’ Then, if mankind begins to refuse to 
give, what follows ? Pangs worse than the gnawings 

knavery, and self-seeking. He is vain-glorious in words, while 
his deeds sometimes culminate in a cabbage-garden; instead 
of dancing with joy on the ruins of national bondage, he has 
too often, alas ! to mourn in penal servitude for the term of his 
natural life.—1866.] 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


279 


of starvation. It would have been far better if the poor 
fellow had never nibbled at the popular loaf at all. He 
is spoiled for ordinary food. Can we imagine a popular 
or ex-popular person a domestic being ? Can we sup¬ 
pose such an one living as a dull, prosy, matter-of-fact 
man or woman of this world ? The dancer who has 
won cheers and flowers by standing on tip-toe and 
whirling round like a spindle, must everlastingly move 
in a galopade, even though it be to that least romantic 
refuge for the weary, called, in plain English, bed. Mrs. 
Siddons could not ask her servant for the mustard, but 
in the high-sounding tones of Lady Macbeth. Elliston 
personating some powerful monarch on one occasion, 
forgot his part, and in the full belief for a time that he 
was a real king, said with a paternal wave of his hand, 

‘ God bless you, my people ! ’ and whatever was his con¬ 
dition off the stage, he is reported to have lived in his 
mimic grandeur of tinselled robes and pasteboard 
crowns. 

We sometimes wonder what are the sensations of men 
or women who have outlived their popularity, and are 
compelled to exist after a common everyday fashion. 
Did not Betty, the ‘ young Roscius,’ survive his brief 
enjoyment of glitter and footlights and unbounded ap¬ 
plause for fifty years ? How is it with singers and 
players who have retired from their profession or from 
whom their profession has retired ? How is it with 
politicians and preachers and platform-orators who have 
sunk into the limbo of the forgotten ? They must exist, 
we imagine, with two identities, their former selves and 


280 


AN ESSAY ON POPULABITY. 


their present selves. They must live in a state of con¬ 
stant distraction, their previous being contending against 
the one in daily use. Seriously, though, we frequently 
regard our friends with a sort of anticipative pity, 
even when they are followed by the cheers of the multi¬ 
tude ; and we wonder how they will bear the depriva¬ 
tion, when the failing of mental faculties and physical 
powers must of necessity be accompanied by the loss of 
admiration and applause. 

What then is the conclusion of the whole matter ? 
Looking at popularity in every light, it has some points 
certainly that seem to render it a desirable property; 
but this view will scarcely be borne out by a closer 
examination of it. The possessor of it struts indeed a 
royal personage— incedit rex —but he walks amidst steel 
traps and spring guns. Would you bargain to incur 
the hazard of Damocles for his dignities ? The theory 
of Sir Walter Scott’s Eebecca on chivalrous fame is 
pretty applicable to nineteenth-century popularity. 
What says Sir John Falstaff ? It has been usual to re¬ 
gard him as a sort of fat, witty, swaggering fool: he was 
a philosopher. Is not his soliloquy on honour a master¬ 
piece of wisdom ? Could either the Stagyrite, or Lord 
Bacon, or Archbishop Whately, have argued more 
syllogistically, or shown a clearer appreciation of moral 
truth ?— 

What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? 
Well, ’tis no matter; Honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if 
honour prick me off when I come on ? How then ? Can honour 
set a leg ? No. Or an arm ? No. Or take away the grief of 
a wound ? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then ? No. 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


281 


What is honour? A word. What is in that word, honour? 
What is that honour ? Air. A trim reckoning !—Who hath it? 
He that died o’ Wednesday. Doth he feel it? Ho. Doth he 
hear it? No. Is it insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But 
will it not live with the living ? No. Why ? Detraction will 
not suffer it:—therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere 
scutcheon, and so ends my catechism. 

As a moral essayist, it is our duty to conclude with 
a few words of practical advice. The love of popularity 
is what the Greek philosophers termed a tyvaLicrj a pen/— 
that is, a natural feeling which is desirable in itself, but 
which is capable of being converted either to a good use 
or to a mischievous abuse. Cherish it therefore after a 
becoming manner; strive after your object legitimately, 
and if you attain it in any degree, use it for the good of 
your fellow-creatures. Let your popularity be such as 
Lord Mansfield desired to attain—that which follows a 
man, and not that which he follows. Are you a young 
gentleman entering upon public life ? Do not allow a 
trifling compliment from some old lady, or friend who is 
drinking your wine, to impress you with the notion that 
you are very popular in your position. Ten to one the 
compliment meant nothing at all. Do you fancy that 
you are an Adonis—‘ as pretty a piece of flesh as any 
in Messina,’—and that the ladies are all in love with 
you ? Be assured they are laughing at you, and calling 
you a noodle behind your back. Are you an Irishman, 
astonishing the natives with your eloquence on either 
side of the Maynooth question ? Do not attach too great 
an importance to your thunder : your celebrity will soon 
become vapid as the beer which the thunder has soured. 


282 


AN ESSAY ON POPULARITY. 


Are you an aspiring orator engaged in some popular 
agitation ? Do not suppose that every cheer which is 
raised for the cause, is intended for yourself. Man! 
vain man ! In the case of many a one we should 
illustrate those well-known principles of political economy 
about buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest 
market, if we could take him at his neighbour’s valuation 
and sell him at his own. Remember too that popularity¬ 
hunting is a dangerous amusement: it has broken more 
necks than steeple-chasing. And, considered as a busi¬ 
ness, it is a ‘ dreadful trade ’—more perilous than his 
‘ that gathers samphire.’ Dover Cliff is steep, and your 
footing is insecure. It is an old maxim, but no less 
wise because of its antiquity,—seek to travel that safe 
middle path which will keep you free from the dirt of 
meanness on the one hand, and of pretentious vulgarity 
on the other. This duty was often inculcated by those 
sage moralists of the Greek drama; and the Epicurean 
Horace, out of all his 1 wise saws,’ laid down no more 
judicious precept than that which linked contentment 
with the golden mean in life. 

The tallest pines most feel the power 
Of wintry blast, the loftiest tower 
Comes heaviest to the ground; 

The bolts that spare the mountain’s side 
His cloud-capt eminence divide, 

And spread the ruin round.—C owper * 

* Ssepius ventis agitatur ingens 
Pinus; et celsae graviore casu 
Decidunt turres; feriuntque summos 

Fulgura montes. — Od. ii. 10. 




283 


VIII. 

A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


Englishmen seem to have a peculiar liking for long 
words. All those terms that have been added to our 
language of late years are distinguished by their longi¬ 
tude and classical composition. A compound of three 
or four Greek words is the favourite manufacture. 
Take the substantive ‘idiosyncrasy:’ it has a full- 
mouthed sound about it; but it must be interpreted to 
be understood. Is it not more rational to speak of men’s 
crotchets than their idiosyncrasies ? No permission 
has been so much abused in our days as that of Horace 
for the manufacture of words. He allows men to mould 
one now and then, with a modest discretion and caution ;* 
but he is addressing poets, not vendors of patent leather 
or dealers in marine stores. Would he not have stood 
aghast at the term ‘ antigropylos ’ ? Would it not puzzle 
a Scaliger or Bentley ? It is time, we protest, to put a 
stop to these vile coinages when every breeches-maker 


* Ars Poet., 58. 


284 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


or blacking-manufacturer invents a compound word of 
six syllables as expressive of his wares. Ladies do not 
wear petticoats now-a-days, but crinolinas. What is 
their new name for garters ? Men do not ride on horse¬ 
back as aforetime—they take equestrian exercise; 
women are not married like their grandmothers—they 
are led to the hymeneal altar. A bookseller, forsooth, 
becomes a bibliopole ; and a servant is converted into a 
manciple. Barbers do not sell tooth-powder and shav¬ 
ing-soap as their fathers did, but odonto, and dentifrice, 
and rypophagon; hair-wash has passed away—it is capil¬ 
lary fluid. Can any one tell us what is the meaning of 
4 diagnosis’ as applicable to disease ? If it has a signifi¬ 
cation at all, we will guarantee to find half-a-dozen 
Saxon monosyllables expressive of the same, idea. Me¬ 
dical gentlemen too talk of phlebotomy: we know that 
it has some connexion with bloodletting, and, for our 
own part, we always associate the term with a night 
we once spent between the sheets, all alive O ! in an 
Irish hotel. 

Aolkvh fie Sr]fiapxos ns £k toov (TTpufidTcov* 

Who would believe that 4 epistaxis ’ means simply 
bleeding at the nose? Fancy one schoolboy doubling 
his fist, and telling another to ‘ look out for epistaxis.’ 
The term 4 phonography’ frequently meets us. Is it a 
treatise on murder ? Or is it the act of writing in letters 
of blood, as was old Draco’s practice ? f What is 

* Arist. Nubes, 37. 

f [‘Phonography’ is a species of short-hand, according to the 
sound of the voice. The term is inaccurately compounded. The 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


28 5 


meant by that fashionable word ‘aesthetics? We 
take up the first book within reach, and open it at 
random. It is ‘ William Wordsworth, a Biography; ’ 
by Edwin Paxton Hood. Well, what do we read? 
1 By aesthetic biography,’ he says, 1 is simply intended a 
life in its ideal attitudes.’ * Simply intended ! Did 
ever mortal man listen to such verbiage run mad? 
What, again, are we to understand by the words * objec¬ 
tive ’ and ‘ subjective,’ which every goose with his sham 
metaphysics has now-a-days on his lips ? These Titanic 
Gilfillanisms will certainly be the death of us. 0 Im¬ 
manuel Kant, why didst thou not spell thy name with 
a C ? Then we read of ‘ Peter Winkelhelter, a Mono¬ 
graph.’ Now, Peter, we do not doubt, is a very good 
fellow; but what is a ‘ monograph ? ’ Does it mean that 
it was written at a sitting ? That is scarcely possible, 
seeing that it covers five hundred weary pages. Or does 
it imply that the writer of the volume has strictly kept 
himself within the limits of its title ? But these mono¬ 
graphs are about anything else than the subject proposed 
—de rebus omnibus et quibusdam aliis. 

Again, what a netfull of long names has been fished 
up by that natural history in salt water, which is now 
so fashionable ! Theologians, moreover, write ponderous 
volumes which they entitle Hermeneutics and Apocalyp- 
tics. Do not the interpreters themselves stand in need 

Greek xp6vos signifies slaughter—a sound. The word there¬ 
fore ought to be either phonegraphy, or phoneography, as in geo¬ 
graphy,—where the ‘ o ’ is interposed between the yrj and the 
ypa<prj. —1866.] * P. 3. 


286 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


of interpretation ? Politicians do not 1 discuss ’ subjects 
in the year of grace 1857 : they 1 ventilate ’ them. Why 
should men indulge their inventive'faculties in spoiling 
a language, unless, as the French diplomatist alleged, 
words were made for the concealment of ideas ? Why 
not stick to the old Saxon of our forefathers? We do 
not talk in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. We do not ad¬ 
dress our groom or the wife of our bosom in words of 
five syllables. 1 1 pr’ythee, now,’ said the fat knight to 
his grandiloquent ancient, ‘ I pr’ythee now, deliver thy 
message like a man of this world.’ Our housemaid— 
to recur to the idea with which we started out—has 
odd ways with her, especially in the matter of dusters 
and followers. These we call crotchets ; but who ever 
thinks of talking about Susan’s idiosyncrasies ? 

The term crotchet is of ancient lineage ; it is evi¬ 
dently as old as music, which is coeval with creation. 
We never exactly knew what was meant by that com¬ 
mon expression ‘ the music of the spheres;’ but we pre¬ 
sume that it is a symphony of worlds, beginning with 
time and still proceeding, and in it there must necessarily 
have been many crotchets. The word therefore had. its 
birth when 

Music, heavenly maid, was young. 

It is to the plain, prosaic mind, what those pleasing 
aerial notes are that strike upon the musician’s ear and 
awake the echoes of fancy in his brain. The term is ex¬ 
pressive of a trifling perversity of thought, from which 
perhaps we may infer that music has always been allied 
to a slight twist of intellect or temper; after a like 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


287 


musical metaphor we speak of persons ‘ giving them¬ 
selves airs.’ A crotchet is a species of ‘ bee in the 
bonnet ’ for the time being ; and an enthusiastic mu¬ 
sician has always some sound or other buzzing in 
his ear. 

As a good harper, stricken far in years, 

Into whose cunning hands the gout doth fall, 

All his old crotchets in his brain he bears, 

But on his harp plays ill, or not at all.* 

It is a good old word, with a genuine expression about 
it—one that Shakspeare found useful and Milton did 
not disdain. When Mrs. Ford said to her husband, 
1 ’Faith, thou hast some crotchets in thy head now, ’f 
what a picture of indoor family life does she suggest to 
us. How often had the restless gentleman teased his 
lively lady at noonday over their venison pasty ! How 
often had he snarled out his j ealous fancies in the night 
season, while the wicked minx was laughing between 
the frills of her cap at this Terentian self-tormentor ! 
1 I’ll carry no crotchets,’ said the valiant Peter to the 
musicians ; ‘ I’ll re you; I’ll fa you; do you note me ? ’ J 
1 This is but a crotchet of the law, but that brought 
against it is plain Scripture,’ writes the republican 
Milton, in his 1 Treatise on Divorce.’ A fancy against a 
fact—a cobweb against a cart-rope ! Burton, in his 
1 Anatomy of Melancholy,’ mixes up 1 crotchets ’ with 
‘ new doctrines, paradoxes, figments.’ The idea con- 

* Dayies. 

f Merry Wives of Windsor , ii. 1. 

\ Romeo and Juliet , t. 5. 


288 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


veyed by the word is not a ponderous one, if we may 
venture to weigh abstractions; it is rather one of those 
intellectual minims, or quavers, or semiquavers, which 
flit through the mind like an agreeable musical move¬ 
ment, and titillate the brain into some quaint line of 
thought. 

Looking at crotchets per se, we are sometimes inclined 
to be annoyed at them, as abnormal divergences in the 
human economy. Looking at them however in their 
final causes, we do not doubt but that, like all other 
phenomena, mental and physical, their tendency is to 
the good of the human race as a whole. It was once 
thought that comets were travellers at random through 
the universe, and whisked along their aerial pathway, 
scorning all principles of motion; but we now find that 
they are subservient to laws as fixed as those which 
regulate our planetary system. So is it with crotchets. 
They seem sometimes to be unruly as the comet, whisk¬ 
ing and frisking about as wildly and coruscating as 
brightly ; but there is a design and a tendency in them, 
after all, or the benefit of society at large. Observe, if 
every man’s ideas ran in parallel grooves, they might 
go on smoothly and uninterruptedly, indeed; but they 
would soon come to a standstill through sheer want of 
steam. The stoker would fall asleep, the water would 
run out, the coal would be wasted, and the train that 
carries us along the railroad of life would come to a 
dead stop on some Shapfell or Salisbury Plain where 
there was neither station nor hotel. What on earth 
would become of us if there were no such things as 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


289 


crotchets? Life would become one Dead Sea—one 
wide, dull, stagnating Pacific Ocean. We should all 
sink into moodiness and insipidity; like the sulky lady 
in the play, we should soon be ‘ sick of a calm.’ Re- 
viewers would write smooth things. Drowsy authors 
would be no longer keel-hauled by critics with the tooth¬ 
ache or the bowel-complaint political writers would 
lie down in peace, without the fear of being Wilson- 
Crokered or Babington-Macaulayed. ‘ The Times ’ 
would scarcely stigmatize the whole body of the clergy 
as a set of idle, useless drones ; it would no longer pat 
these Spurgeons on the back with one hand, and with 
the other give a slap on the face to our clerical orators in 
Exeter Hall; it would be consistent, but prosy. Lovers 
would not be able to pick a quarrel at any price; the 
race of Mrs. Caudles would be extinct—those lively 
ladies who refuse to 1 go to sleep, like good souls.’ Lord 
Palmerston and the Right Honourable Benjamin Disraeli 
would repose in each other’s arms, as innocent as the 
babes in the wood, while robin-redbreasts covered them 
up, and the nation went to ruin. Mr. Gladstone and 
Sir Cornewall Lewis would pledge each other in the 
loving cup, and sing in unison ‘ We won’t go home till 
morning,’ while the finances of the country were sinking 
into inextricable confusion. My Lords Cardigan and 
Lucan, Sir John McNeill, Colonel Tulloch, and the Staff 
Officer, would join hands, and sing with infantine unction, 

1 Let dogs delight to bark and bite,’ while the military 
service was suffering.* The two Sheffield blades, Roebuck 
* [Written in 1857—1866.] 


VOL. I. 


U 


290 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


and Hadfield, would lose their fiery edge and shut up, 
while abuses were wearing away our much-enduring 
constitution, and dissent was flickering like a farthing 
rushlight in its unsavoury socket. In short, we should 
become, one and all, so many Rip Van Winkles of the 
Sleepy Hollow. But now while we are moving leisurely 
on, and subsiding gradually into drowsiness in our re¬ 
spective carriages, whiz comes the crotchety idea, rush¬ 
ing across at right angles with the speed and impetuosity 
of an 1 express, 1 smashing a few luggage vans, rustling 
up sleepy old gentlemen, astonishing timid old ladies, 
and causing all the travellers to open their eyes and 
wonder. Then follow lively sallies of indignation—ob¬ 
jurgations on the head of the guard—anathemas on the 
signals—threatenings, loudly expressed, of writing to 
4 The Times ’—all of which are symptoms of vigorous 
life. A whimsical fancy sometimes sweeps over a nation, 
and stirs it from its depths as the hurricane rouses up 
the slumbering ocean. 

Indeed, we have a suspicion that if we were to ex¬ 
amine the history of inventions, discoveries, and benevo¬ 
lent schemes, we should find that a majority of them 
have had their origin, directly or indirectly, in some 
crotchety idea or crotchety man. What was the pursuit 
of alchemy but a crotchet ? It was a half-knavish, half- 
foolish one, it is true; but it led to certain discoveries 
which we could now-a-days but ill spare. While 
hunting after the philosopher’s stone and the elixir vitae, 
Roger Bacon stumbled upon gunpowder. In following 
some such phantom Van Helmont found out the prop- 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


291 


erties of gas, Geber brought to light many hidden truths 
in chemistry, and Paracelsus discovered the medicinal 
quality of mercury. Bacon’s system of inductive philo¬ 
sophy, if we recollect aright, was first suggested to him 
by some lecture-room badinage; Newton started the 
theory of gravitation on the impulse of a whim; and 
Watt caught his earliest idea of the power of steam from 
observing its action on the lid of a tea-kettle. Did not 
some Louis of France turn tinker and invent a lock ? 
Did not Charles V., in his monastic retirement, indulge 
his whim for mechanics, and construct clocks on im¬ 
proved principles ? Did not Edmund Beckett Denison, 
Esq., Q.C., design and superintend the moulding of 
1 Big Ben,’ whose iron tongue is destined to wake our 
slumbering senators, and to strike the weary hours 
through many a pointless speech ? What but a crotchet 
prompted Lord Rosse and the Rev. Mr. Craig to build. 
their leviathan telescopes ? Is it not a crotchet that 
induces such men as Bruce, Audubon, Bellot, Dr. 
Livingstone, and Captain Burton to imperil their lives 
in the exploration of the earth’s darkest regions ? Was 
not Howard under the influence of a crotchet—a bene¬ 
volent one, it is true, but a crotchet still—as he devoted 
his life to the improvement of our prisons ? Was it not 
a similar Eestrum that sent Miss Nightingale to the East 
on her noble mission—a mission combining the chivalry 
of the knight with the tenderness of the woman ? And 
if the term crotchet implies something unusual—some¬ 
thing different from ordinary tastes,—what but the 
whim of self-denying humility makes her shrink from 


292 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


shoutings and speech-makings, while many with heroism 
more equivocal seem to swallow their honours whole, 
and, like Oliver Twist, to come for a second helping ? 

The world at all times has entertained a strong 
prejudice against ‘a crotchety man.’ The expression 
is stereotyped with a sneer. This however is not al¬ 
together a correct mode of thinking. It by no means 
follows that a man of one crotchet is a disagreeable 
fellow. Crotchets are many and diverse—some peevish 
and prickly, others amiable and pleasing. Now a person 
who is under the influence of one genial crotchet may 
be a right loveable character. Who does not sympa¬ 
thize with Uncle Toby in his sham fights and real loves ? 
Our friend however must not have many whimsies, or 
his fancies will become obscured, as the eye is dazzled 
with too much glitter of colour or brilliancy of light. 
The interior of such an one’s brain, if it could be ex¬ 
hibited, would bear a strong resemblance to the inside 
of a kaleidoscope. But he who is possessed by one 
amiable crotchet may be a delightful companion, and 
the more so from his peculiar mode of thinking on a 
given point. All his mental and moral disorders, it may 
be, are absorbed into the one leading sentiment, and the 
rest of the system is healthy; just as a boil on any 
fleshy part of the body gathers into one point all the 
unhealthy humours and discharges them, for the relief 
of the patient. But in dealing with the man of one 
whim, you must be careful how you handle him. He 
is peculiarly sensitive if you stand in the sunlight of 
his leading idea. If your friend is determined to mount 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


293 


his hobby, let him have his ride; if he is inclined to 
run a muck like a mad Indian, or to tilt at a windmill 
like a fanciful knight errant, keep out of his way. Urge 
him onward in his course, but with caution ; work him 
on your hook, but mildly, as old Izaak Walton would 
have dealt with his fish or his frog. After awhile he 
will exhaust himself, like the knight-errant or the trout; 
and he will dismount from his hobby-horse one of the 
mildest and most tractable creatures in existence. You 
may lead him with a thread. 

We remember a tutor at college who was a man of 
one crotchet—kind and amiable, and the very best fellow 
in the world, if you respected his whim. His name 
was Macfarlane; and the only thing in life he hated or 
resented was to be thought a Scotchman. We never 
learned 1 the reason why but the fact was well known., 
Our conscience smites us at the recollection of a trick 
we once played upon the good-natured old soul. It was 
a cruel act; but we may as well make a clean breast of 
it. Two or three of us one day met in the street a hard- 
faced Scotchman, in a Highland dress, performing on 
the bagpipes. We conducted him to our college, brought 
him to the staircase leading to the tutor’s rooms, and 
gave him directions how he was to proceed, intimating 
that he would meet with 1 something to his advantage.’ 
In about two minutes after we heard voices inside the 
room in altercation 1 wild and high,’ and in a second out 
rushed the kilted Scotchman with his bagpipes, and 
the long leg and thick shoe of the tutor were visible in 
hot pursuit. ‘ The mad deevil!’ ejaculated the 


294 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


musician, as lie tumbled down stairs almost upon us, 
out of breath, in amazement, and apparently in pain— 
‘ The mad deevil disains kith and kin!’—‘Well,’ we 
asked, ‘ how did you go on ? What did you say ?’—‘ I 
said, sirs, I kent weel his auld mither, Mrs. Macfarlane, 
o’the Broon Coo i’ Paisley !’—immediately after which, 
it appeared, he got his rough notice of ejectment. We 
allayed the Scotchman’s wrath by a couple of half-crowns; 
and later in the day we saw him again, moving about 
somewhat stiffly, as we thought, but still playing with 
a considerable degree of spirit, ‘ The banks and braes o’ 
bonny Doon,’ to about a hundred admiring urchins. 

In our younger days we used to stay sometimes with 
an old uncle who was under the influence of a single 
crotchet. He was a clergyman, and a very fine charac¬ 
ter in every respect; only you had to permit him to 
enjoy his whim undisturbed. Woe to the unfortunate 
being who stood in his way as he dashed forward on his 
hobby ! His crotchet was, ‘ Brandy and salt.’ It was in 
his estimation a universal specific; inwardly or out¬ 
wardly applied, it had the same healing properties. 
Give it a fair trial, and it was an infallible remedy for 
colic, asthma, rheumatism, gout, burns, contusions, lum¬ 
bago, influenza, erysipelas, heartburn, indigestion, head¬ 
ache, consumption, and the other ailments to which flesh 
is heir. Our uncle w r as himself a temperate man ; but 
he hated the very name of teetotalism, simply because 
persons of this order applied reviling epithets to one in¬ 
gredient at least in his cure-all. He regarded brandy 
as one of those providential gifts for which mortal crea- 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


295 


tures have especial reason to be thankful; not so much 
because it makes glad the heart as restores the body. 
He had a great objection to medicines generally. Parr’s 
pills, Holloway’s ointment, Bath plasters, pulmonic 
wafers, Locock’s decoction, fluid magnesia, cod-liver 
oil, revalenta Arabica, and all such ‘ real blessings,’ he 
religiously abjured. Epsom salts, castor oil, tincture of 
rhubarb, and black draughts he set at nought. Physic 
made easy, in the shape of homoeopathy, he eschewed. 
He ignored the whole library of domestic medicines; he 
pooh-poohed Doctors Buchan and Graham. Next to 
his Bible, he believed in brandy and salt. He held a 
country rectory, with a small population; and, in all 
cases of sickness, he was ever ready with his panacea. 
One day, we recollect, an old woman came begging to 
the parsonage; she was evidently a stranger to the lo¬ 
cality, for she began to put forward some complaint or 
other, the nature of which we forget, as a plea for relief. 
She was the very subject he wanted; he laid hold of her 
vi et armis , and poured down her throat, as he would 
have administered a draught to a calf, a powerful dose 
of his never-failing mixture. The old woman retired 
hastily, with her hand at her mouth; and the rector 
returned to his study beaming with smiles and self- 
complacence, and in the genial spirit of one who has 
done a good action. Every night he pressed us to take 
a draught of this elixir vitas; but our aunt, “who was a 
kindly old lady, invariably gave us the brandy in one 
cup and the salt in another, so that, as the latter never 
came into solution, we could indulge in the praise of our 


296 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


beverage without any qualms of conscience. We won 
the old rector’s heart by an acquiescence in his theories; 
and he invariably pronounced, with a sort of oracular 
gravity, that we were destined to make a figure in the 
world—a prediction yet to be fulfilled. 

But who can catalogue individual crotchets in their 
number and variety ? How many are attracted round 
the scientific theories of the present day ! One philo¬ 
sopher will describe to you some operation of nature a 
hundred million years ago, with as much assurance of 
infallibility as if he was watching the process with his 
own eyes at the moment; and if any one should hazard 
a doubt on his dogma, he would regard him with some¬ 
thing like scorn, or at best pity. On the other hand, the 
Dean of York takes his stand on the old ways; he 
maintains in the teeth of the whole 1 British Association 
for the Advancement of Science,’ that the sun, the moon, 
and the earth, stand still; and we honour the old dig¬ 
nitary for the bold avowal of his opinions, if not for his 
scientific constitution of mind.* No less chivalrous is 
the crotchet of Mr. Buskin, who is ready to fight against 
the world in defence of his pre-Raphaelitisms. We 
meet with an ingenious fellow now and then who, like 
our old friend Monkbarns, is bitten with the maggot of 
antiquarianism, digging Roman remains out of dilapi¬ 
dated pig-sties, tracing Runic pillars in worn-out mile¬ 
stones, and discovering Druidical relics in broken chim- 

* [When the Association met at York, the late Dean Cockburn 
startled the members by reading a paper in which he maintained 
these opinions with great determination.—1866.] 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


297 


ney-pots. Another has the crotchet philological, hunting 
back words that were coined yesterday in the mill or 
workshop to the Anglo-Saxon or the Sanscrit. Again, 
how fiercely do our homceopathists and allopathists con¬ 
tend over their respective systems! Whatever their 
drugs may be, the allopathist’s temper is not without 
acidity and bitterness, and the homoeopathist’s crotchets 
are by no means infinitesimally small. That is a less 
amiable weakness we sometimes hear of, which leads 
young men of business to dissipate fortunes, hardly earned 
by their fathers, in gambling-houses and on race-courses, 
and to ape aristocracy, like a monkey in a red jacket, at 
Melton Mowbray. Of all crotchets that come before us, 
we see none more pitiable than that of a young cotton 
lord deluding himself with the idea that he is an aristocrat, 
because he is spending his money like a fool. 

As to the crotchet genealogical, we know not whether 
to regard it with amusement or indignation. Will any 
philosopher explain to us how the love of a pedigree has 
such a hold on many minds ? Look at these two men: 
one stands six feet, and is a handsome and well-formed 
specimen of humanity ; the other is a puny, misshapen 
minikin, who seems incapable of being turned to any 
profitable use whatever on this earth; it is a case of 
1 Hyperion to a satyr : ’ now, is it not passing strange 
that the fine active fellow would give almost every thing 
he has for the fifteen generations of the queer little 
creature by his side ? And what makes it more mar¬ 
vellous still,—the one in reality has just as long a pedi¬ 
gree as the other. It is not as though the finer specimen 


298 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


had sprung up by spontaneous generation, and, according 
to the Darwinian theory, might be traced back to a 
fungus a given number of years ago : both have had a 
parentage since the deluge. Wherein then do they differ ? 
And yet there is an instinct within the unpedigreed man, 
however fine he may be in physical structure, which 
suggests to him the desire of seeing his ancestral tree on 
parchment. Hence originate those mythical genealogies 
which are drawn out in imagination and recorded in 
print: we are not speaking of heroes who have sprung 
from heathen deities, such as Hercules and Achilles,— 
but of families who profess to have descended lineally 
from bare-legged Britons and Roman generals. How 
can we bear with patience such nonsensical crotchets ? 
At one time reasonable people were satisfied with going 
back to the times of ‘ the Conquerorand why should 
they not now? What more would you have? We 
fear indeed that our professional pedigree-compilers 
are not quite free from blame in conniving at genea¬ 
logical sillinesses. We could ourselves point to certain 
names in Burke’s 4 Landed Gentry,’ associated with long 
lineages, which previous to their publication had been 
kept a profound secret from nearest relatives and closest 
friends. At the time we write we have an acquaintance 
whose leading, almost only, idea for the last twelve months 
has been the construction of his coat-of-arms. His father 
was once a butter-badger, and his mother took in clear¬ 
starching ; but the son, having been born not only with 
a silver spoon in his mouth, but with a whole service of 
spoons, has now several thousands a year, and his great 


A DISCOUBSE ON CJROTCHETS. 


299 


object in life is to trace back bis pedigree, and to rescue 
from undeserved oblivion the shield of his ancestors. 
Of his grandfather and great-grandfather not a trace 
remains; but taking up the skein at the preceding 
generation, he makes his way easily to Charlemagne as 
his ancestor,—his name is Charlesworth. He has pest¬ 
ered Sir Something Somebody, Garter King-at-Arms, 
almost out of his life for the last year. We gave our 
friend mortal offence by requesting him, in a kindly 
spirit, to leave off such abstruse researches, and to adopt 
at once 1 three butter-kegs rampant and a clear-starcher’s 
bowl reversed.’ 

Mr. Robert Owen, at the age of eighty-eight, is fol¬ 
lowing his ancient whim, and publishing a Millennial 
Gazette, in which he bequeaths to posterity his life-long 
schemes for raising the human race to its proper level. 
Sir Culling Eardley fancies that the regeneration of our 
species must issue from Exeter Hall and Evangelical 
Alliances. Sir Robert Peel’s crotchet seems to consist 
in telling all he knows about everything and everybody. 
1 Extremes beget extremes ’ may here be understood 
without a metaphor; for the late Sir Robert, who was 
the most reserved, reticent, and self-concentrated of 
men, became the father of one who is the most open- 
hearted, free-tongued and ingenuous of youths. 

We occasionally see an acknowledgment from the 
Chancellor of the Exchequer of a bank-note which has 
beeil transmitted to him as conscience-money. Not long 
ago, we observed that a hundred pounds had been sent 
to him ( from one who had often shot without a licence 


300 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


in his youth.’ Had the man been addicted to poaching? 
had it been his ‘ delight on a shiny night, in the season 
of the year ? ’ Then perhaps he had taken a game and 
provision shop, and got on in the world. We often 
wonder what kind of a person he is who pours his money 
so recklessly into Her Majesty’s Exchequer. We are 
not aware that we ever met with a man who put such a 
screw on his conscience. Is he a Puseyite awaking to 
a sense of the truth ? Or a Methodist compounding for 
sanding his sugar and watering his tobacco ? Or a 
Quaker who abjures all compulsory levies whatever? 
Or is the advertisement a deception in toto —a mere dodge 
on the part of the Chancellor of the Exchequer to make 
the nation believe that our taxes are just—a decoy-duck 
for the slaughter of genuine tax-payers ? If however a 
bond fide transmitter of conscience-money exists, we 
have a notion that he is a crotchety being. A person 
may be all conscience or no conscience, either of which 
conditions is a dangerous one. We pity the man’s wife; 
she has a weary time with him, no doubt. My youthful 
lady reader, never marry a man who, to your knowledge, 
has sent conscience-money to the Chancellor of the Ex¬ 
chequer, if you value your future peace. Better take 
ourselves, an old bachelor subject to periodical fits of the 
gout. He may be, it is true, a well-meaning but crotchety 
fellow acting simply on the impulse of a freak; a pig¬ 
headed animal who determines to do like nobody else— 
as unpersuadable as the simpleton who adopts the maxim 
of 1 every man his own doctor,’ and coaxes for himself a 
chronic dyspepsy; as impracticable as he who acts upon 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


301 


the principle of 1 every man his own lawyer,’ and leaves 
a snug lawsuit for his descendants to the fourth gene¬ 
ration. 

So far as we Northerns are concerned, we exhibit 
much of this latter kind of crotchet. We are energetic, 
combative, pig-headed. We ourselves have friends 
in these manufacturing districts who are never at ease 
except they be in contention. Julius Caesar, it is. said, 
would have been a good wrestler, if he had never led an 
army : combativeness, that is, will find a channel some¬ 
where for its exercise. Last summer we took a trip 
through the Lake districts of Westmoreland. On ar¬ 
riving at the Birthwaite station, our attention was drawn 
to a desperate quarrel between an old gentleman with a 
red face, white whiskers, and a broad-brimmed hat, on 
the one part, and a railway porter, on the other. We 
felt inclined to side with paterfamilias, who evidently 
belonged to the same county as ourselves. The day 
following we met him at the ‘Ferry,’ when he was engaged 
in a fierce encounter with a boatman. The next time we 
saw him was at Newby Bridge, when he was in high 
altercation with our friend Mr. White of the White Swan, 
who is himself somewhat choleric, as befitting an old 
soldier. From the English Lakes we went on to those of 
Scotland, and, as it happened, the old gentleman and his 
party took the same route as ourselves; and wherever 
we came across them, we found him in furious strife with 
man or woman. We heard broad Lancashire in discord 
with shrill Scotch, while his wife and two rather pretty 
daughters looked on as if the proceedings were of a 


302 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


routine character—quite a matter of course. It seemed 
strange to us at the time that old Square-toes should 
indulge in such vagaries while he was on a trip of 
pleasure, and the sun was shining, and the birds were 
singing, and lovely scenery was around him, and his 
pockets were Ml of money; but unquestionably he en¬ 
joyed his lively sensations after his own fashion. 

We are energetic too with our combativeness. We 
must ever be pulling down something and building up 
something—it may be an educational system, or a 
church establishment, or a commercial theory—and we 
call our measure, by courtesy, a reform. We would 
undertake the three feats proposed by Sydney Smith, at 
a minute’s notice, and never doubt of success. It is 
the easiest thing in the world among us to get up an 
association for any conceivable purpose. While your 
dull Southern is gaping, we form a committee, elect 
a chairman, fix on a secretary, call a public meeting, and 
launch our scheme instanter. The boat, it may be, is 
tossed about a little, lets in water and soon sinks, but 
what of that ?—we forthwith launch another. Then if 
we have nothing else to assault, we attack the Pope, just 
to keep our hands in. It is an agreeable pastime enough 
to pelt his Holiness; but it appears sometimes to our 
feeble faculties that there is a vast amount of popes in 
life besides the old humbug in the Vatican. There is 
a physical combativeness too in our population. Hoes 
not our sturdy friend, Jack-o-Ned’s, from Rochdale, 
consider that his drink is lost on him, unless he has a 
fight on the top of it ? Young Lancashire, moreover, 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


303 


has a crotchety penchant for deranging machinery and 
hearing the smash of windows. Not long ago we were 
walking a few' steps behind two rough-looking Ashton 
youths, who were approaching our city, when we heard 
one say quite seriously to the other, as he pointed to a 
green-house in the shape of the Crystal Palace,—* Loo’ 
thee, Bill, what a gradely nice place to clod a stean at! ’ 
We have so far treated more particularly of the man 
with one crotchet. Some persons however are made 
up of whims. Now while the man of one crotchet may 
be an agreeable companion, your owner of many whims 
must per se be a detestable fellow. Occasionally it has 
been our lot to forgather with such a lump of obliquity. 
Dr. Collinson, late Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, 
and Provost of Queen’s, commenced one of his sermons 
at St. Mary’s in a broad north-country dialect, as 
follows :— £ There is a large class of people in the world 
who take an oblique view of things.’ This created a 
titter among the grave dons and giddier juniors; for the 
doctor’s eyes pointed outwards and apparently turned a 
corner, like the horns of a cow of the old English breed, 
and he seemed to be himself an apt personation of the 
species he was going to describe. But both the doctor 
and ourselves use the term metaphorically; we speak of 
a class of persons who have a moral obliquity of vision. 
If any object whatever be placed before them, they see 
it squinting-wise. It reaches their eyes darkened, 
distorted, and twisted into all manner of shapes, like a 
spoiled daguerreotype, or the reflection from a splintered 
looking-glass. 


304 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


We sometimes wonder what is the material compo¬ 
sition of a man who has many crotchets. He must be a 
conglomeration of snags and snarls, of pins and needles, 
of prickles and penknife points. Alas for the wife of 
his bosom ! How did she ever consent to take him for 
better and for worse, when the only prospect was that it 
would be all worse and no better?* And yet you never 
see such a specimen of perversity without a wife. We 
know such.an one who is wearing his fourth—the Blue¬ 
beard! Where could his wooing be done? Not under 
the milk-white hawthorn, while the warm breeze was 
playing around, perfumed with the scent of wild flowers. 
It must have taken place in a wilderness of thorns and 
briers and nettles, when the snow was on the ground, 
and an east wind was blowing. Alas, we say, for the 
wife of his bosom ! You would no more think of em¬ 
bracing such a creature than you would of petting a porcu¬ 
pine, or nursing a hedgehog, or stroking a Scotch thistle. 

We do not think that your genuine snaggy fellow 

* Not long ago, as we were walking out in the country, we 
overtook a brisk-lcoking stonemason, who was apparently leaving 
his work for the day. ‘ Good evening, sir,’ he said, respectfully. 
After we had returned his salutation, he added—‘ But mayhap 
you don’t remember me?’ ‘Why, no,’ I answered; ‘I cannot 
exactly call to mind where we have met.’ He then reminded me 
of some concern we had in his wedding about seven or eight 
years before. ‘ Well,’ we continued, ‘it was a case of better and 
worse, was it not ? ’ ‘ Ay, to be sure,’ he said. ‘ Then how has 

it turned out? You have given it a fair trial.’ ‘Why,’he 
replied meditatively, ‘ as near as I can think, it’s bin abaat hafe 
an’ hafe ! ’ Is the ‘ hafe an’ hafe ’ a fair average 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


305 


belongs to any class in particular ; be is found more or 
less in all sects and societies. A good specimen might 
be selected from among Radical Dissenters. The very 
principles of the party consist in opposition to con¬ 
stituted authority, and no doubt these are carried out 
into all the details of life. Your Radical Dissenter, we 
are assured, never lets his crotchets lie idle, as his wife 
and children and maid-of-all-work can testify; but he 
comes out pre-eminently at a vestry meeting. With 
what acid sanctimoniousness does he demand a poll 
when the church-rate is passed ! With what spiritual 
unction does he condemn our ecclesiastical system, 
root and branch, as despotic, unjust, and destructive 
of souls ! But we find this angularity sometimes in 
the High Tory churchman as well; he often regards 
his dissenting foe as not a whit better than a rebel to 
religion and his country—as a man who, out of pure 
love of railing, indulges in the cheap luxury of abusing 
the church and the clergy. Indeed, it may be affirmed 
as a general principle, that they who adopt views in op¬ 
posite extremes on any given subject are men of similar 
characteristics. Still the character of the thoroughly 
crotchety man is found among all classes and ranks of 
society. Wherever you turn in life you meet with this 
species of cur, snarling and snapping at every decent 
man’s trousers. He is now, suppose, sitting in committee, 
and the resolution to be passed is, that two and two 
make four. There seems to be a general unanimity on 
the subject. One gentleman, remarkable for his caution, 
has certainly wished to try the problem on the duode- 
x 


VOL. I. 


306 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


cimal principle. Another, who has the reputation of 
being a great logician, has argued the point at some 
length, and with much fairness. But all appear to be 
agreed that two and two make four. The chairman is 
on the point of putting the motion, when up jumps Mr. 
Jaggerson : he has reserved himself for a great effort. 
Two and two make four, gentlemen ! Can anything be 
more absurd than to affirm this as a general rule ? It 
is contrary to Scripture—downright infidelity ! He 
thanks Providence that he has now been married eight 
years to his dear wife, Johanna—he had kicked her only 
the evening before—and did not Scripture say that they 
two were one flesh ? Then, he had two darling chil¬ 
dren—he had sent them to bed without their supper, 
for no reason whatever, before he came to the meeting. 
Would any man say, in the case of himself, his wife and 
family, that two and two were four ? He now turns his 
asperity on his fellow-committeemen. His friend, Mr. 
Gripeall—-he is supposed to lend out money at a usurious 
rate of interest—makes two and two into twenty ; then 
leaving the arithmetical question he launches out into 
bitter inuendoes and provoking allusions which may 
apply to some who are present, and many who are absent, 
and sitting down in a state of pious perspiration, he de¬ 
clares that his conscience will not allow him to remain 
longer a member of a committee which can affirm that 
two and two make four. Now, what annoys us most 
with the genus Jaggerson is, that the impostors are ever 
talking of their conscience—a property about which they 
know as much as a man born blind does of neutral tint. 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


307 


If a highwayman comes up to yon with a revolver and 
demands your purse, why, you do not love the man, 
certainly, but there is an honest dishonesty about him, 
after all. He makes no pretence to superior sanctity. 
He does not take high moral ground with you. He 
wants to finger your purse, and have done with the 
business, and so he tells you. But of your snivelling 
wretch, who is ever pinning a sham conscience on his 
sleeve, while he is robbing a neighbour of what is more 
valuable than his purse—your vile hypocrite who is 
concealing hateful lies under texts of Scripture, and 
cowardly slanders under a love of the Decalogue, why, 
why,—we say nothing: Carlyle would say—squelch him. 
And yet,—is it not illustrative of the Englishman’s 
peaceable nature ?—that kind of man will often snarl 
through seventy years, and die in his bed unkicked. 

In these days when philanthropists and patriots are 
1 plenty as blackberries,’ might not some of them turn 
their attention to the reformation of our crotchety 
people? Might they not, for employment’s sake, try 
their hand at straightening the crooked sticks of society ? 
Or, at any rate, might they not devise some means for 
keeping them quiet, and preventing them from being 
mischievous to their neighbours ? But then the question 
arises,—Does not the majority of a community consist 
of crotchety people ? There’s the rub. 4 Must they all 
be hanged that swear and lie ?’ asks the son of Lady 
Macduff. 4 Every one,’ answers the mother. 4 Who 
must hang them ?’ 4 Why, the honest men.’ 4 Then,’ 

the lad* reasons smartly, 4 the liars and swearers are 


308 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


fools: for there are liars and swearers enough to beat 
the honest men, and hang up them.’* So we fear that, 
if the crotchety part of a population were to rise up 
against the uncrotchety, they ‘ would prove the better 
counterfeits.’ 

Still the idea of a reformatory for men and women 
under the influence of curable crotchets is not a bad one. 
The great problem of the day is,—How to dispose of our 
convicts,—a class marked by a certain whimsical con¬ 
fusion of idea in judging on the meum et tuum ? This 
ticket-of-leave system is beginning to arouse the reflec¬ 
tive powers of the nation. Mr. Lobbersley looks every 
evening to the priming of his old flint and steel blunder¬ 
buss, which has been laid up in ordinary since the 
expected invasion of Bonaparte; Mrs. Lobbersley sleeps 
with one eye open; and the Misses Lobbersley shriek 
out if a cat squalls on the housetop at midnight, and 
rush into the room of Mr. and Mrs. Lobbersley in their 
night-dresses. Then these gentry of the garotte-school 
respect neither person nor place. Not long ago a friend 
of ours, an alderman, who devotes his time to the good 
of his fellow-citizens, was taking what is called a 
‘ promiscuous walk’ at night-fall, when his eye rested 
on a spot that seemed somewhat darker than it ought 
to have been. Being a member of the Works’ Im¬ 
provement Committee, he takes a survey of the place, 
and in the spirit of a patriot determines on setting down 
two lamps and widening the causeway there, when three 
men rush from beneath the shadow of an adjacent 
* Macbeth, iv. 2. 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


309 


building, and, without saying ‘ by your leave,’ whip a 
handkerchief round his mouth, thrust a knee against the 
lowest of his spinal vertebrae, rob him of his watch and 
purse, and, like unfeeling scoundrels, leave him lying on 
the scene of his good intentions with every breath of air 
pumped out of his body. We lately saw an account of 
an income-tax collector having been garotted; for him 
we have no anxiety—he was paid for it. But it is al¬ 
together different with a benevolent alderman. The 
question therefore is, What are we to do with our 
convicts ? Surely we must not turn them loose on so¬ 
ciety to break into houses, crack skulls, and garotte 
aldermen and tax-collectors, according to their own 
merry fancy. Even a tax-collector is a human being. 

Why should we not then attempt a solution of this 
relative problem,—What can be done with our crotch¬ 
ety people generally?—those, we mean, who are made up 
of splinters ? Would it be possible to build a large hos¬ 
pital for their accommodation, or to take a farm sur¬ 
rounded by a ring fence for their exclusive residence ? 
It would, methinks, act well in many ways. First, it 
would be a sort of social penfold for cooping up animals 
that are wont to damage fences and commit trespasses. 
Then, it would be an asylum well fitted for the moral 
discipline of the residents. A thousand persons, each 
with a strong prickly crotchet in his composition, living 
together on the same premises! The idea may seem 
startling; but upon the patients the effect must be good, 
either by blunting in some measure their sharp edges 
or by entailing among them a reciprocity of scratches. 


310 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


It would enable scientific men also to investigate the 
various species of the disease, and to apply a remedy 
accordingly. We would stipulate that the Governor 
should be well remunerated; and we would have a 
Chaplain appointed, and make it a provision that he 
should never give them less than an hour’s lecture. 
It would practically enforce on them the virtue of pa¬ 
tience. A friend of ours, a Gaol Chaplain, is very fond 
of delivering long sermons,—not altogether to inculcate 
a lesson of patience, but because he can never satisfy 
himself that he has given all the good advice which he 
might. He writes his sermon for half an hour, but 
swells it by extemporaneous patches, and by parenthesis 
within parenthesis as explanatory; so that it stretches 
out like an elastic cord to an hour’s duration. One 
day not long ago a Visiting Justice passing through the 
prison enquired, as usual, if the inmates, individually 
or collectively, had any complaint to make ; when one 
man with a face moulded for a grievance stepped for¬ 
ward, and said that he had. The Magistrate immediately 
paused, took out his note-book, adjusted his gold pencil- 
case, and prepared himself to record any statement. 
‘Well,’ he enquired, ‘ what is your complaint? ’ ‘ Why,’ 

replied the man in grey,—‘ it’s agen Mr.-(the 

chaplain) ; he prayches us to death,—he’s never done.’ 
‘ H’m,’ said the official visitor, musingly, applying his 
pencil-case to his lips and giving them two or three 
gentle pats with the butt end of it,—‘ H’m—why, no 
—you see I cannot take down that complaint ’—then 
with something like a tone of sympathy—‘ You see, my 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


311 


man, it’s a part of your punishment—a part of your 
discipline, you know.’ 

On reasoning upon the question of a fitting discipline 
for the crotchety with a friend, who has seen something 
of the. world, he invariably lays down one recipe for 
their management; and that is, a sound ash-planting. 
But it is unchristian, some one replies. He takes the 
following line of argument: Unchristian ! nothing of the 
kind ; it is in the truest spirit of Christianity. It is an 
exhibition of your affection for the man, because you 
wish to beat the foul fiend out of him. Do you impugn 
the Christianity of the Primitive Methodists when they 
batter a [poor wretch black and blue, under the im¬ 
pression that they are driving the devil out of him? 
Handle then your supple twig briskly, and do not 
listen to any argument from Mr. Scrags—at least, take 
the wind out of him first, and argue with him afterwards. 
The favourite trick of such an one is to put the grossest 
insult on another, and immediately to adopt the pious 
dodge, and harangue upon the iniquity of retaliation. 
His notions of forgiveness, like the Irishman’s system of 
reciprocity, are all on one side. Thus he claims a free 
warren of abuse, and makes one act of injustice but a 
stepping-stone to another. Is it not then a Christian 
act to restrain him with a walking-stick ? How often 
has that self-same man inflicted cruel wrong upon 
another ! How often has he wantonly wounded his 
neighbour’s feelings, and created misery in families ! 
And he has done all, to hear his own statement, in love. 
Therefore, ash-plant him in love. Do we not, over and 


312 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


over again, hear religious controversialists—men who 
must act on Christian principles—heaping the foulest 
obloquy on each other’s opinions and practices, and 
all in the spirit of love? Therefore, ash-plant Mr. 
Scrags in love, and do it smartly. 

Hitherto we have considered crotchets in reference 
to individuals only; had we space at our disposal, we 
might enlarge with benefit to the community on what 
may be termed class crotchets. Men are frequently 
drawn onward in packs by the scent of some whimsical 
project. A wild thought soon becomes a watchword. 

Turn to the domain of politics. Peace associations, 
peace congresses, peace prophecies, dazzle us one mo¬ 
ment, and the roar of cannon deafens us the next. We 
wish well to friends Cobden and Bright; but they have 
not lately shown themselves to be either prophets or 
practical men. The Repeal of the Corn-Law however 
serves them well—it is as effectual as Caleb Balder- 
stone’s fire at Wolfs Crag. After their first success they 
fancied that they had a mission to reform the world, and 
they have accordingly ever since shot their arrows out 
of mortal sight. They have propounded sentiments 
more appropriate for the millennial age than for the 
days of mills and machinery. They remind us of Count 
de Cabra, in Washington Irving’s‘Conquest of Granada,’ 
who on one occasion was lucky enough to take King 
Boabdil el Chico, and who could not be content till he 
had attempted the capture of another monarch, when 
unfortunately he was taken by surprise, and unmerci¬ 
fully peppered. Kings are not caught every day. 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


313 


Then, lo ! we see, marching along the street, a crowd 
of people in procession, with banners bearing such in¬ 
scriptions as 4 The Maine Liquor Law,’ 1 The United 
Kingdom Alliance for the Suppression of Traffic in 
Intoxicating Drinks.’ We love to see our fellow- 
creatures amusing themselves on a sunshiny day; but 
if men and women determine not to get drunk, why 
make so much row and bother about it ? We hope 
that procession may not meet the burly members of the 
‘ Licensed Victuallers’ Association’ going to their annual 
gathering, or it might be a case of beer against water for 
the victory. 

But a parliamentary election is perhaps the most 
effectual hotbed for the growth and development of po¬ 
litical crotchets. In the full belief that 1 the proper 
study of mankind is man,’ we attended a crotchet-exhi¬ 
bition at our last general election. The large hall is 
densely crowded ; the candidate stands on the platform, 
supported by his friends; his speech has been made, 
and he is now ready to answer any questions. ‘ Would 
the honourable gentleman give us his opinion on the 
Maynooth grant ?’ asks a person in the body of the room, 
with a black muzzle and hair closely cropped. Mr. 
Smoothison perceives at once that he is standing on un¬ 
safe ground ; he begins to feel his way cautiously, like 
the boy on the ice, who is trying how near he can ap¬ 
proach the board marked 1 dangerous.’ He goes back 
to the time of Pitt, confuses, mystifies, and wearies, till 
another elector in his impatience shouts out—‘ What is 
your opinion, sir, of the duty on leather ? ’ ‘ There’s 


314 ' A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


nothing like it,’ responds a wag from a corner; and the 
candidate, wishing to escape from the Maynooth question, 
declares boldly that ‘ the duty on so useful a com¬ 
modity ought to be reduced.’ ‘ Church rates ? ’ shouts 
one ; ‘ secular education ? ’ cries another ; ‘ the duty on 
tea ? ’ roars a third ; ‘ the income tax ? ’ vociferates a 
fourth ; ‘ the Jews ? ’ halloos a fifth ? ‘ taxes on know¬ 
ledge ? ’ demands a sixth; * you ’ll not have much to pay, 
at any rate,’ chimes in the wag from the corner. Now 
while Mr. Smoothison was felicitating himself on the 
evident fact that his opponents were smashing their 
crotchets one against the other, a grisly-headed, long¬ 
faced, fierce-looking fustian cutter, who from his son¬ 
orous voice was evidently a ranting preacher, asks him 
for his sentiments on the extension of the suffrage and 
the ballot. Mr. Smoothison then begins his reply by 
admitting ‘ the difficulty that surrounds the two ques¬ 
tions;’ he argues and haw-haws all around them; he 
talks about the intellectual development of the people. 

‘ Intellectle development! ’ wheezes a very fat man who 
was puffing in the crowd ; ‘I’m blowed if either queen 
or parliament develop me.’ ‘ Thou ’re too lusty already, 
Jem,’ retorted the wag. ‘ Three cheers for Smoothing- 
iron and old Pam,’ bellowed a blacksmith with a grimy 
face—‘hurrah!’ Mr. Smoothison bowed graciously, 
and smiled blandly ; and amidst the cloud of opinions, 
jests, and cheers, the honourable member in embryo es¬ 
caped like a Homeric hero. In the ‘ British Banner ’ of 
the following day it was reported that he had won all 
hearts. 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


315 


We scarcely dare venture into the region of religious 
and ecclesiastical crotchets. What a strange phase of 
the human mind, for instance, is exhibited in Mormon- 
ism ! and yet the whim is evidently gregarious. Are 
men attracted to this system of belief by the bait of many 
wives ? The ‘ San Francisco Herald ’ lately informed us 
that the Legislature of the Utah territory consisted of 
forty men, and that the aggregate of their wives was 
four hundred and eighteen; that the President of the 
Council had fifty-seven, and that one member of the 
Government, who was a cripple and almost blind, had 
nineteen for his comfort. Look at the Agapemone, the 
abode of love, the scene of mental and moral affinities, 
where ladies and gentlemen have their games of hockey 
and ride out together in carriages and four. What a host 
of crotchets too do we meet with in the religious world, 
of a less offensive character ! The Nonconformist weeps 
over Church idolatries and Church-rates; the Papist 
over heretics and unbelievers ; the Evangelical over the 
advances of real Popery and counterfeit Popery ; and 
the Tractarian over the removal of his wax candles and 
evergreen crosses. And even now as we write our ears 
are assailed with a hubbub about Sunday bands. The 
Sabbath League is growing into form and power. A 
knot of energetic men is springing up in all our towns, 
purposing to pipe virtue into the wayward with wind 
instruments—youthful philanthropists, who are under 
the amiable delusion that habitual Sabbath-breakers 
may be fiddled and tromboned into a moral frame of 
mind—original thinkers, who have struck out the idea 


316 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


that the evil one may be expelled from his throne by the 
battering of drumsticks. Orpheus is expected again to 
visit us, and to tame savage natures with his clarionet. 
Such wonders are to follow from the concord of sweet 
sounds as the world has never seen since Arion sat 
astride of his dolphin.* 

* [The salient clerical crotchets of the present day seem to 
consist in a hankering after Romish vestments and Church unions. 
We might laugh at this fondness for mediaeval millinery, as we 
are amused at the whims of children, were it not for the dis¬ 
sensions and troubles that are likely to result from it. The section 
of the Church that has lately mounted this hobby, and is now 
riding it with so much vigour, is only a small and uninfluential 
one per se ; but when we remember what disunions and distrac¬ 
tions have sprung in former times out of these paltry contentions 
about black gowns and white gowns, we cannot but regard the 
agitation as charged with the elements of danger. It seems to 
us passing strange that men of intelligence, having in their 
hearts a love of the Church in which they are ministers, should 
raise a question so fraught with disturbance, on a rubric, which, 
whether literally in their favour or not, was assuredly not 
intended by its framers to have allowed any such permission as 
is claimed. Then, these agitators for promoting the union of 
Churches have even less excuse than the advocates of albs, 
copes, ehasubles and incense. The latter rely on a rubric, which, 
though a manifest mistake, is still litera scripta. But how Dr. 
Pusey can recommend a union of the Romish and Anglican 
Churches, on the ground that their articles of faith a,re recon¬ 
cilable, must be a marvel to any sober mind. The Doctor is 
unquestionably a devout and learned man; and one is utterly 
unable to account for that idiosyncrasy which could have faith 
in any such attempted fusion. Place our Articles by the side of 
the Decrees and Canons of Trent, and you may as reasonably 
expect to mix fire and water as to bring them into concordance. 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


317 


Social crotchets, too, are legion. What strange fancies 
are observable in civilised communities on questions of 
dress? We think the New Zealander somewhat quaint 
in his apparel; the lady who luxuriates on the coast of 
Africa may seem rather scantily clad. But such exhi¬ 
bitions as these are not more ludicrous than the costumes 
we sometimes see in the streets of civilised London 
and Paris. Why blow up ladies like bladders or 

Dr. Pusey has, we are told, hut few followers at Oxford in this 
matter: he lives out of the busy, stirring world ; and it seems 
to us that he can only have adopted these opinions under a 
species of self-delusion consequent on thinking long in one groove, 
and under a forgetfulness that there are in print copies of the 
Thirty-nine Articles and of the Tridentine Decrees. What, 
again, can be the meaning of this meeting in London, attended 
by more than one English Bishop, to smooth the path for a 
union between the Anglican and Greek Churches ? Are any of 
our Bishops so far forgetting themselves as to join in this most 
absurd and visionary whim ? Can they rebuke with authority, 
if any innovator among their clergy be brought before them, 
however fanciful may be his crotchets—however unfortunate his 
delinquency ? What do we understand to be the exact purpose 
of this restless body? Are they the United Church of England 
and Ireland in their own persons ? It is marvellous how Bishops 
may shut themselves in their Palaces, or listen only to the 
adulatory addresses of a few who surround them, till they forget 
that there is a world of clergy and laity beyond their own 
narrow clique. We do not hesitate to say that ninety-nine out 
of every hundred among the clergy would, repudiate these silly 
notions of union between the three Churches, and that nine 
hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand among the laity— 
members and constituent parts of our Church—are now looking 
upon all such projects with a scorn and contempt not safely to 
be trifled with.— 1866 .] 


318 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


balloons ? If the human form were by nature distorted 
and*’ misshapen, this concealment of the real figure 
might be reasonable ; but on what principles consistent 
with sanity ladies involve their graceful proportions in 
hoops that are fitter for herring-casks, and in petticoats 
inflated like a macintosh cushion, it is impossible to say. 
If your little daughter wishes to decorate her doll in a 
fanciful way, very well; if you determine to dress up 
your monkey in a red jacket and blue trousers, we have 
nothing to say against it. But that the divine image of 
a rational creature should, without sense or shame, be 
made the mere framework for bags of wind and hoops 
of whalebone, is an idea fitter for a chimpanzee than a 
human being. * Seest thou not what a deformed thief 
this fashion is V ‘ Where do the fashions come from ? ’ 
we have heard of a child asking its father. ‘ From 
London, dear.’ * And where do they get them from 
at London ? ’ * From Paris, my child.’ 1 And where do 
they get them from at Paris? ’ ‘Well from the devil, 
I think.’ We agree with papa, if absurdity is any proof 
of their paternity.* 

* [Mr. Burke, Mr. Alison, and others, whose works we have 
read, tell us that there are common principles of taste, on which 
all minds of education and refinement must and in the main 
do agree. How account then for these strange aberrations 
from every recognised law of elegance and symmetry, which 
fashion even in its most refined aspect sometimes assumes? 
It seems that hair of a reddish hue is now coveted by the 
fair sex : we hear in ‘ Punch ’ the lady lamenting in melancholy 
tones that she is doomed to misery inasmuch as her J s is 
black. For our own part we have rather a liking for hair 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


319 


That was a shocking social crotchet which many 
wives had some two centuries ago, for dismissing their 
husbands by a slow poison. We trust that the recipes 
of La Spara, Tophania, and Madame de Brinvilliers have 
been lost to the world. In our manufacturing towns 
however we have doses of 1 quietness ’ wrapped in two¬ 
penny parcels, and sold over the druggist’s counter as a 
matter of course. It is not many months since a wife 
at Rochdale administered such an effectual dose of this 
powder to her husband, that she gave him his quietus 

which is crimson by nature, particularly if Miss Bouncer has an 
undeniable squint with it. There is something unique—out of 
the common order—in the combination. But we have no patience 
with those who cultivate the carroty colour by artificial means. 
Ladies even in our matter-of-fact city, we have been told, are 
seen with a species of gold dust in their hair, to give it, we 
presume, the fashionable tint. How account for all this, assuming 
that common sense is not altogether leaving us ? Dr. Livingstone 
met with African belles who considered it the perfection of 
beauty and comfort to be profusely smeared with butter. 
Captain Speke, we remember, came upon a tribe in his explor¬ 
ations where elegance was made to consist in fatness. The 
Chiefs daughter, who was intended to be a paragon of symmetry 
and grace, had been made to sit and suck milk through the day 
so long, that she had become one lump of obesity—as disguised 
in features and limbs as a Christmas prize pig. Lady Blanche 
Powderhead laughed doubtless, when she read Captain Speke’s 
description of the Chiefs handsome daughter: but does it show 
any higher degree of wisdom or common sense to scatter gold 
dust on your head, Lady Blanche, simply because a giddy 
Empress of the French does it? 

‘ Quid rides ? mutato nomine, de te 
Fabula narratur.’—Hor. Sat. i. 1. 69.—1866.] 


320 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


for good. It is only intended, so far as we understand, to 
subdue an uproarious husband when he is tipsy. It is a 
quality much esteemed at home among the female part 
of our population, when a man is 1 quiet in his drink.’ 
‘Ay,’ a woman said to me not long ago, in excuse for 
her father, 1 he takes his drop o’ drink, I know, but he’s 
always quiet with it.’ 1 Well, how does he amuse him¬ 
self?’ ‘ He does nothing but sit in the corner, and 
sing the 11 Old Hundredth” and the 11 British Grena¬ 
diers.” ’ The father was a pensioner; he had been one 
of the forlorn hope at Badajoz, and had fought in every 
main battle through the Peninsular campaigns; and 
yet, we grieve to say it, he valued his honours at a 
lower rate than a pot of beer : when the Queen visited 
Manchester, we redeemed his medal with twelve clasps 
from the pawnshop. 

Commercial crotchets, again, abound. What was 
Law’s Mississippi scheme but a crotchet ? So with our 
own South Sea bubble, and the thousand wild projects 
that gathered round it. Nor were our railway whimsies 
of a later date either more rational or moral. We never, 
for our own part, held any shares but once. A friend 
of ours, then on the velvet cushion of railway prosperity 
and rolling in his splendid equipage—now a porter at a 
union workhouse—came up, and told us in his bland, 
patronising way, that he had some ‘ pet shares’ to dispose 
of, but only to his particular friends. ‘ Take some, my 
dear fellow, and consider yourself in luck.’ We paid 
two pounds ten a-piece for thirty shares in the Bam- 
boozleton Junction, as a deposit; we subsequently paid 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


321 


the same sum on a call; after which we never heard a 
word of Bamboozleton or its junction. We verily be¬ 
lieve that there is no such place in existence. 

A word of counsel at parting, kind reader, as be- 
seemeth a moral essay. Try to find out what is your 
individual crotchet; there are few men without some 
peculiarity of thought or temperament. It is not how¬ 
ever so easy for them to discover it. That y v&Ql aeavrov 
of the Greek sage is a problem few solve in life. The 
most fanciful blockhead in a Town Council does not 
know that he is an ass. The most unmanageable donkey 
in the House of Commons imagines himself to be the 
most easy, compliant being alive. The veriest chat¬ 
terer in that baby Parliament called Convocation, is 
Sir Oracle, in his own estimation. The teetotaller, or 
the vegetarian, or the Particular Baptist, who condemns 
to the limbo of fools or reprobates all that do not swear 
by his individual whim, is totally ignorant that he is 
passing condemnation on himself. The man who gives 
a couple of hundred pounds for a tulip does not suppose 
that he has a crotchet in his composition. That 1 giftie ’ 
of ‘ seeing ourselves as others see us,’ is a rare qualifi¬ 
cation. Still, try, as the lady cook says, to catch your 
crotchet; and then turn it to account. It will be your 
making or marring, according to the channel into which 
it is guided. Nil desperandum: ' never say die. Made 
virtute , puer : 1 go where glory waits thee.’ Is not our 
schoolfellow, Goosey Gripeall, now a millionaire, a 
member of Parliament, and within sight of a peerage ? 


VOL. i. 


Y 


322 


A DISCOURSE ON CROTCHETS. 


Is not our old acquaintance, Bob Bounce, a secretary or 
under-secretary in some department of Her Majesty’s 
Government? Is not that college dunce, Jabez Lea- 
therhead, a popular preacher, and next on the Premier’s 
list for a bishopric ? 


323 


IX. 

MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


The age in which we live has been singularly charac¬ 
terised by the anxiety it has evinced to benefit the 
humbler classes of society in our land, and to help those 
who are unable or unwilling to help themselves. Our 
legislature has not been neglectful of this duty; our 
congresses have endeavoured to inculcate it; our reli¬ 
gious societies have devoted much time and labour to 
the fulfilment of it; private and personal efforts have 
been successful in advancing this good object. Wher¬ 
ever we turn, we hear expressions of sympathy with the 
toiling poor, and we find an earnest desire to ameliorate 
their lot in life. This zeal has sometimes developed 
itself in sound practical measures; sometimes it has 
expended itself in hollow demonstrations, and speeches 
that attain their end in popular applause : but the very 
imitation of truth proves the existence of truth; and 
the fact remains, that the period in which we live is 
distinguished beyond all others for its philanthropic 
y 2 


324 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


spirit and its kindly feeling, especially towards our less 
avoured brethren. 

But while much has been written and spoken on the 
condition of our operative populations, only a small 
portion of this has been dictated by personal acquaint¬ 
ance with them. Members of both Houses of Parlia¬ 
ment gain their information on such a topic mainly from 
Reports of Commissions and Blue Books; philanthro¬ 
pists who take up the cause of our working people see 
them and address them at public meetings, on exciting 
occasions, but their knowledge of them does not pene¬ 
trate beneath this outer surface; speakers on platforms 
even, who may be assumed from their position to have 
mixed with the class, are not always those who have 
done so most intimately at their cottages and firesides; 
by a large proportion of our countrymen, again, the 
operative manufacturing population is an order scarcely 
known, and consequently but little understood. It can¬ 
not therefore be a matter of surprise, that much has 
been said upon this part of our community which con¬ 
tains with its truth a large admixture of error, and that 
much is done for its improvement which is dictated by 
the best motives, but is not carried out on the truest 
principles of practical adaptation.* 

The question we shall now examine is,—By what 
moral agencies is there a likelihood of elevating our 

[* This essay never appeared in Fraser's Magazine , as a whole. 
It was engaged for by the editor, and for the most part prepared 
in draft; but owing to the ill health of the writer at the time, it 
was not completed.—1866.] 


MOBAL LEVEBAGE FOB THE MASSES. 325 


working populations generally, to a higher tone of 
thought and feeling, whereby their standard as reasoning 
men may be raised, the comforts of their households 
increased, and the welfare of the country promoted ? 
There are doubtless many secular forces which may 
be classed under the head of moral leverage. The con¬ 
struction of a poor man’s dwelling must necessarily act 
powerfully for good or ill on himself and his family ; 
the sanitary arrangements of the neighbourhood in 
which he lives must have an influence beyond his 
material comforts simply; whatever gives facility for 
the investment of his savings, or offers to him induce¬ 
ments to save at all, will have an effect beyond the 
mere accumulation of pounds, shillings, and pence ; the 
better regulation of gin-palaces and the total suppres¬ 
sion of beer-shops would be a boon to the nation and a 
mercy to the working man, view the question in what 
light you may. These may be called secular forces ; 
but moral ends of great moment are certainly, though 
it may be indirectly, attained by them. Our legisla¬ 
tors and philanthropists have of late years awoke to a 
sense of their efficacy; and though in the control and 
extension of those agencies much more remains to be 
done, we cannot but be thankful, notwithstanding, for 
what has been already achieved by them, through 
the instrumentality of public enactments, and private 
effprts. 

It is our purpose, however, in the present essay to 
confine ourself to the consideration of what may be 
denominated moral forces, strictly speaking; and these, 


326 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


in general terms, may be reduced to two—the Church 
and the School; or, enlarging the area in some degree, 
they may be described as agencies, religious and educa¬ 
tional. 

The Church. 

In bringing forward our National Church into the 
van of our moral forces, we do not mean to say that it 
is the only religious power at work. We would ever 
desire to deal fairly with the various agencies that the 
several Nonconformist bodies wield for the diffusion of 
right principles and corresponding practice; and we 
always sincerely regret, for the sake of humanity, when 
we see them endeavouring to pull down or injure that 
Church of the nation which, notwithstanding all the 
swelling words of babblers, is assuredly the poor man’s 
solace and defence. The minister of the chapel is the 
minister of the people who attend there, and no more: 
the chapel of one sect is in principle and sentiment as 
broadly divided from that of another, though they stand 
side by side, as each is from the Church: we find 
therefore so many isolated centres from which a certain 
amount of moral warmth radiates; but if they stood 
alone, the masses of our people most assuredly would be 
overlooked, and left in their degradation. Our Church 
however overrides all, and assumes the responsibility of 
dealing with those who are sunk the lowest in spiritual 
and personal destitution, as well as with those who move 
in the walks of luxury and affluence. Upon the pre¬ 
sumed influence of Nonconformity, if left to itself, orators 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 327 


often talk the loudest, in consistency with the general 
rule, who know the least about it; but we are quite 
sure that any one who has worked in a poor district as a 
moral or religious teacher, and is therefore practically 
acquainted with the matter, must from the very force 
of observation acquiesce in the truth of our statement. 
If we were a Nonconformist minister we should not 
attack the Church and clergy in their parochial visita¬ 
tions ; but we should heartily rejoice that they removed 
so vast a labour from our shoulders, so intense an 
anxiety from our minds, so daily a danger of infection 
and disease from our bodies, as are involved in the 
ministerial supervision of the masses of our people. 

Whoever is acquainted with our manufacturing dis¬ 
tricts, knows well how churches have multiplied there 
during the last forty years. In the previous half cen¬ 
tury the population had been increasing in an increasing 
ratio ; but from some cause or other the Christian spirit 
of the land was asleep. Whether the minds of men were 
so swept along in the opening floodgates of commerce, or 
so absorbed in the portentous events that were surging 
furiously onward abroad—whether they were so en¬ 
grossed in erecting an idol to Mammon at home, or in 
contemplating falling thrones at a distance—as to be in¬ 
capable of spiritual concentration, they were certainly 
unobservant of the dangers that were gathering around 
them, and were only awoke, out of their deep sleep or re¬ 
verie by the heaving of human masses, guided by a sense 
of self-interest, but uncontrolled by moral or civil law. 
Nor was it till after many a shock that the millionaire 


328 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


slumbering on his money-bags was aroused. Then 
by degrees the truth dawned on him that he was dig¬ 
ging out riches to fall into the pit himself. A new era 
commenced ; a consciousness of responsibility began to 
leaven the hearts of the wealthy. Whether from, self- 
interest, or from a higher motive, the working man was 
now looked upon as a brother, endowed with a reason¬ 
ing mind and an immortal spirit. And, be the truth 
fairly spoken, since that time the efforts that have been 
made in the interests of the operative classes are stupen¬ 
dous ; the liberality that has been shown is marvellous ; 
and, amidst the many agencies for benefiting the poor, 
churches have sprung up, and are springing up on 
all sides, so rapidly as to repair in some measure the 
neglect of our forefathers, and to keep pace with the 
material growth and moral wants of our manufacturing 
districts.* 

But the question arises,—How far have the churches, 
so munificently raised by voluntary contributions, been 
of such a character as to produce the greatest moral 

[* A paper on the ‘ Growth of the Church in Lancashire ’ 
was read at the Manchester Church Congress, 1863, by the Rev. 
A. Hume, D.C.L., LL.D., in which the subject is treated in a 
clear, distinct, and compendious manner, and at the same time 
the fullest information is afforded. « During the first 30 years 
of this century,’ he says, ‘ the population (of Lancashire) increased 
89£ per cent., the churches 20 ; during the second 30 years the 
population increased 82, and the churches 82. Thus, during 
half the period under review, we have kept pace with the popula¬ 
tion in the matter of providing churches ; but sometimes the 
one moved a little faster, and sometimes the other.’_1866.] 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 329 


effect upon the districts around them ? Of those that 
have been built in our populous towns, during the last 
five-and-thirty years, by far the most have been conse¬ 
crated under the Act that invests the patronage in 
trustees. This measure has given a great stimulus to 
church extension ; for the laity, in manufacturing dis¬ 
tricts especially, are reluctant to spend their money on 
any undertaking, unless they have some power and re¬ 
sponsibility in directing the issue of it. But the 
Trustee Act has not been an unmixed good. Its pro¬ 
visions may be suited sufficiently well for a church in a 
wealthy neighbourhood, where the poor are few and the 
pew-taking parishioners are many; but they are quite 
inapplicable to a locality of exclusively working people, 
where particularly a place of worship is needed. The 
endowment consists of 1,000Z., invested in government 
securities, or 30Z. a year; this is the amount of settled, 
income. Then two-thirds of the sittings are intended 
to be let, and these are almost invariably placed in the 
most eligible parts of the church, while the remaining 
one-third are in some dark and uninviting spot, and 
are soon filled by Sunday scholars.* A church built 
on such arrangements is adapted to a wealthy suburb ; 
even in a middle-class neighbourhood it may flourish 
under the magnetic attractions of a popular preacher, 
or even the less conspicuous visitations of a faithful 
pastor; but it is on false principles entirely, con¬ 
sidered as a place of worship likely in itself to gather 

* According to the Act, even the one-third may be let at a 
low rent, with the consent of the Bishop. 


330 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


the poor within its walls.* Sir Robert Peel’s Act was 
dictated by a truer sense of what was required. First 
of all, an endowment of 150Z. a year is provided under 
it, as a basis of the incumbent’s income; then, a rea¬ 
sonable addition thereto may be expected from certain 
letable pews ; but it is provided at the same time that 
the best sittings in the church shall be free and open 
for ever to all who are wishful to join in the service. 
Thus the two-fold object is secured-*—a fair income 
to the clergyman, and unrestricted worship for the 
poor. 

The question is a prominent one at the present time, 
—How can an adequate income for the clergyman, com¬ 
bined with the freest use of the church, be most 
appropriately secured? There is a zealous and doubt¬ 
less well-meaning party of ecclesiastical reformers who 
urge with a most indomitable persistency, that every 
sitting in every church should be open to all without 
fee or payment, and that the incumbent’s income should 
be derived exclusively from the weekly offertory col- 
lections.f It is possible that this plan might be success- 

[* This Act was obtained through the efforts of some gentle¬ 
men in Manchester, and the first church that was built under it 
was the one in Salford, of which the late Rev. Canon Stowell 
was for many years the highly influential and esteemed incum¬ 
bent.—1866.] 

[f The Association for Promoting Freedom of Public Worship 
had its birth, and still has its head-quarters, in Manchester. It 
is not a child of large dimensions; but it has thriven in some 
degree, and its operations have been characterised, if not by the 
soundest discretion, by a degree of perseverance which has been 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 331 


fully tried in some districts; indeed, it is reported to 
have been so; but, as a general system, the adoption of 

rarely paralleled in any cause. It has not been forgetful, we 
perceive, of that ancient saying about the influence of national 
ballads, and has attempted to turn the attractions of song to 
account—we know not with what effect. W e give a few verses 
of a parody on the ‘ Old English Gentleman,’ published by this 
energetic band of reformers; we have not heard whether the 
old gentleman in his new dress has made many converts. 

I’ll sing you a Church of England song, made by a Churchman’s 
pate, 

Of a fine old Church of England man who toasted Church and State, 
And went to Church on Sundays, too, though always rather late, 
With notions of religion just a little out of date; 

Like a fine old Church of England man, 
Ofie of the days gone by! 

His pew was lined and carpeted to save his Sunday clothes, 

His purple bound morocco books were ranged in goodly rows ; 
And there he’d worship at his ease, though sometimes he would 
doze, 

And wake the congregation with the echoes of his nose; 

Like a fine old, &c. 

All sorts of innovations he devoutly did eschew, 

New Schools, new Churches, Services, whatever else was new; 
Church restorations in his day, of course, were very few, 

He thought them but an artful trick to rob him of his pew; 

Like a fine old, &c. 

Hut people grew and multiplied, he could’nt stop their growth ;— 
Those Welsh and Cornish miners, and those pitmen of the North! 
To own that something must be done he still was very loth ; 

And Birmingham and Manchester! —oh, how he hated both! 
Like a fine old, &c. 


332 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


it could only lead to a disastrous failure. In every 
town of considerable dimensions a body of men may 
be found sufficiently numerous to carry out such a 
scheme with some show of success in a single church ; 
but if it were applied generally, it would be most de¬ 
terminedly resisted by the laity. A father and mother 
naturally desire to occupy their own pew with their 
family; and is it not better that they should do so 
than that the several members should be scattered 
up and down in the building, as they must inevitably 
be, where every seat is free and occupied without order ? 
It may be said that the exclusiveness and isolation of a 
pew militate against that righteous sense of universal 
equality which ought to prevail in the presence of the 
great Supreme ; but we conceive that this is a fanciful 
sentiment rather than a real vital truth. If you seek 
for that frame of mind most conducive to a spiritual 
worship, you will find it, in the wealthier classes, when 
they have their families around them, and, among the 
poor, when they are surrounded by honest, well-behaved, 
well-dressed men of their own rank. It has been found 
too in certain churches, where the ceremonial attractions 
have been great, that from the influx of strangers the 
very parishioners have been excluded from the service. 
Then, would such a plan produce an adequate amount 

‘ Throw open all our Churches, sir ? ’twill really never do! 
There should he some distinction made for such as I and you; 

What! ask me to sit cheek by jowl with Bob, and Bill, and Sue!_ 

Oh, no! ’ he cried, * I never will;—I won’t give up my pew.’ 

Like a fine old, &c.—1866.] 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 333 


of income ? In some few cases it might; in the great ma- 
j ority, we think, it would not. It would take years to test 
the scheme fairly : there may be a jubilant cry of success 
at first, but how will it be when the novelty has worn 
off, and the early blaze of enthusiasm has gone out ? 
The clergyman must be a sanguine missionary of his 
idea who would throw himself upon the offertory col¬ 
lections in a poor manufacturing district. As Horace 
says of virtue, he might be praised, but he would starve. 
And viewing human nature in its ordinary phase, is it 
not found to be more agreeable to have to discharge 
your debt of conscience in one quarterly sum, than to 
be always unbuttoning your pocket and dribbling out a 
dole? Who has not experienced the irksomeness, at 
some of our watering places, of being compelled before 
leaving any place of worship you enter to contribute 
your shilling or half-crown ? But the worst effects of 
the scheme would appear when the incumbent and the 
churchwardens proceeded to make a division of the sum 
collected. The amount of course must be appropriated 
to several objects, and the respective proportions would 
be a matter of consideration—might be one of dispute. 
If the incumbent and churchwardens were on very 
friendly terms, there might be no difficulty in the ad¬ 
justment; but it not unfrequently happens that jealousies 
exist between clergymen and their officials. Church¬ 
wardens in manufacturing districts are not averse from 
the possession of power, and sometimes not backward 
in the exercise of it. We suspect therefore that, in 
conformity with the rubric, an appeal to the Ordinary 


334 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


would be a necessity more frequent than might be con¬ 
ducive either to episcopal comfort, or official loving¬ 
kindness, or ministerial good-will. On looking over 
the names of those who advocate the scheme, it is 
amusing to see how many are entirely beyond the 
reach of its influence; some, wearing mitres, and sitting 
on thrones, and living in palaces; some, dignitaries paid 
largely each half year from a fixed revenue for 
labours popularly supposed to be not too burdensome 
for human nature to sustain; others, spending a dolce 
far niente existence in snug vicarages, and enjoying 
themselves on the proceeds of commuted tithes and 
glebe lands. They who are thus vegetating can afford 
to support the plan; they can look on it with compla¬ 
cency ; nay, they can rejoice in a new sensation, as men 
who are regarding a battle scene from a safe distance. 
But how would it be with those who were in the thick 
of the conflict ? It would be difficult to devise any 
scheme better adapted to place the ministerial body 
under laical control. Can this possibly have escaped 
the perception of the clergy? * 

[* We may he allowed to place side by side the antagonistic 
opinions of two great divines on this subject. The Archbishop 
of York delivered an address at Sheffield on church-building in 
1865; he is reported as avowing himself one of the ‘ well-abused ’ 
Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and then saying,—‘ I think it better 
not to let the pews, and for this sufficient reason, that we cannot 
get out of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners any endowment if 
we have pew-rents.' (Applause.) Would the members of this 
* well-abused ’ body condescend to tell the poorer clergy what they 
mean ? With the Archbishop’s doctrine of ‘ the equality of man- 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 335 


We conclude, therefore, that the best system of church 
building and endowment in our poor and populous 
districts will be found in the mean between the two ex¬ 
tremes we have considered. First, let the endowment 
be never less than 150L a year ; * by this means you 
raise the incumbent at once above the level of positive 
starvation, and so relieve his mind from many cares. 
As an equivalent for the endowment, let one-half of 
the building at the very least be set apart as free to the 
poor for 4ver; and that, not in some back dismal corner, 
to be encroached on by Sunday scholars, but in the 
choicest part, where the humbler worshippers may have 
the privilege of seeing well and hearing well. Then 
the remainder may be let in pews for the benefit of the 

kind,’ Dr. MeNeile thus deals. ‘ In York minster,’ says the 
Doctor, ‘his Grace sat upon a throne (laughter), conspicuously high 
above all the congregation; the Dean sat in his stall, the Canons 
in their stalls, above the congregation. (Laughter and applause.) 
And amongst the congregation some sat in pews—raised pews 
along the aisles, with closed doors and soft cushions (laughter); 
others sat on benches in the aisles. Now he heartily approved of 
the practice in York minster, but he took the liberty of ex¬ 
pressing his disapproval of the theory of his Grace the Arch¬ 
bishop.’ (Applause).—1866.] 

[* Since the above was written the Ecclesiastical Commis¬ 
sioners have bestirred themselves, and conferred a great boon on 
the poorer clergy by augmenting their incomes to a fixed sum 
under certain conditions. But surely they will be careful, that 
in all churches which shall henceforward be built, such restrictions 
be laid on them that they may not unduly absorb the funds 
available for the increase of small livings. That would be a 
great injustice to those old churches which have borne the 
burden and heat of a long and toilsome day.—1866.] 


336 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


clergyman. By this arrangement all are accommodated; 
the poor have their appropriate places; the shopkeeper, 
the tradesman, and the merchant, according to their 
means, have seats which they may occupy with their 
families ; the incumbent has an income from the endow¬ 
ment which gives stability to his position, and he has a 
considerable addition thereto from his pew-rents. A 
clergyman so situated has a stimulus to his energies, 
without being worn down by anxiety and despondency. 
Our country vicars frequently become idle, because 
their income has no relation to their zeal; our town 
incumbents are often dispirited and sink into apathy 
from the decrease in their pew-rents, the slight percep¬ 
tible result of their labours, and the uncertainty of 
their prospects. The condition therefore to be aimed 
at is that wherein the pastor is raised above depressing 
cares, and his energies at the same time are stirred up 
by the hope of adding still further to his congregation 
and his income.* 

[* ‘ But when cases occur, as of course they now and then 
will, of carelessness in a minister of an endowed church, the 
unthinking are apt not to consider that if such a man were stimu¬ 
lated to activity by his maintenance depending on it, that 
activity would be likely to do more haign than good. Such a 
man would be likely to court popularity, by flattering the preju¬ 
dices and the faults of his people.’—Archbishop Whately’s Mis¬ 
cellaneous Remains, ‘ Prevailing Religion ’ (note), p. 172. The 
Archbishop, powerful reasoner as he was, sometimes allowed 
himself to slide down a logical proclivity into a fallacy. His 
Grace would probably have admitted that it is more in accor¬ 
dance with human nature (fcora tyvaiv) for a person to subside 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 337 


In the collocation of churches too care, discretion 
and judgment should be exercised. It cannot be as¬ 
serted as an invariable rule that our buildings for public 
worship originate in motives of unmixed purity. They 
sometimes spring out of parochial contentions and per¬ 
sonal disappointments: they have their rise in a species 
of zeal, but that zeal which is compounded of self-glori¬ 
fication and self-will; and hence they are occasionally 
hastily got up, and their arrangements are settled with 
a view rather to present contingencies than to their 
permanent fitness and effects. Thus, taking an area 
with 30,000 inhabitants in a manufacturing town, it is 
not beyond possibility to find three or four churches 
for that locality, but so situated relatively to each other 
as to be mutually counteractive of influence,—as, at 
any rate, to leave no doubt that all cannot answer the 
ends for which they were designed. By these means 
useful energies and good money are wasted; and the 
beneficial influence of our Church, in its continued and 
ultimate action, is sacrificed to the impetuosity of a 
few persons who combine a stubbornness of will and a 
determination of purpose with a clouded mind and a 
perverted judgment. 

But after building your church on correct principles, 
and in a locality where it is most needed, the next re¬ 
quirement is a suitable person for its minister. What 
is the class of clergy most wanted as pioneers of religious 
truth in our rough, untamed manufacturing districts ? 

into a state of gentle ease than to arouse himself to the exertion 
required of one who hunts after popularity.—1866.] 

VOL. I. Z 


338 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


And how are they to be obtained ? These are pro¬ 
blems more easily propounded than solved. If you 
could point out the want, and then show how it might 
be supplied, you would be achieving a great triumph 
in practical discovery. A difficulty meets us here 
which has never yet been surmounted. It would 
doubtless be an incalculable blessing to these unculti¬ 
vated localities, if a clergyman were placed in each, 
competent to' meet and overcome his peculiar obstacles; 
but the man exactly fitted for the work is not to be ob¬ 
tained at a moment’s notice. What we want for such 
districts is a body of clergy, not necessarily highly edu¬ 
cated and refined, but strong-headed and ready; not 
classical in their learning and tastes, but good practical 
theologians ; not polished in elocution and diction, but 
capable of expressing themselves clearly and forcibly 
in their native way ; making no pretensions to aristo¬ 
cracy of family or gentility of bearing, but zealous and 
energetic in duties that would be discouraging to the 
sensitive mind ; indifferent whether they be invited to 
the tables of the great, but determined to reach the 
hearts of the poor; not seeking rapid advancement, but 
willing to spend and be spent among the order from 
which they are sprung. But this is a class not easily 
obtained. Our Colleges for the economical training of 
clergymen do not send us men of this stamp, as a rule. 
It was undoubtedly the object of their institution, that 
clever, active, Christian-minded youths, of humble 
means, and intellects not highly refined, might gain ad¬ 
mission to Holy Orders ; but so far as our observation 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 339 


and experience go, this purpose has only been very 
partially fulfilled by them. The clergy that have 
passed through them are not, generally speaking, the 
most devoted to work; neither are they the humblest 
in spirit nor the most prudent in action. 

Indeed, not only is it difficult at all times to procure 
the exactly fitted incumbent for the peculiar locality, 
but in the present day it is by no means easy to meet 
even with curates at all for our populous manufacturing 
parishes,—curates at least who have any aptitude for 
their work. It is stated in the Exeter Diocesan Calendar 
that of those admitted to deacons’ orders for the ten 
years ending 1863, the number was less by 647 than 
that for the previous decade; and this decrease, we 
must remember, is concurrent with a vast increase of 
population and a large extension of church-building. 
In short, the experience of every incumbent in the 
swarming, smoky districts of England testifies to the 
great difficulty of obtaining active, faithful, and intel¬ 
ligent colleagues in the ministry at all. It is painful 
to write this, but the fact is beyond denial. Is it that 
the warmth of zeal, and energy of purpose, and strength 
of will, which constitute the inner life of the soul, and 
are the motive power which sends our missionaries to 
their self-denying labours at home and abroad,—is it 
that these kindling soul-vitalities are going out like an 
expiring taper within the breasts of our young men ? 
Is it that they love cushioned ease better than kneeling 
at the bedside of the- cottage, and drawing-room small 
z 2 


340 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


talk more than serious conversation with the poor? We 
cannot believe this. 

But, whether as incumbent or curate, it is assuredly 
no easy task that he takes upon himself, if he devote 
his powers to the evangelisation of a poor district which 
has been growing in population and left destitute of 
spiritual supervision. Consider for a moment the scene 
of conflict that is before a clergyman who is placed over 
a newly formed parish in the lowest part of a manufac¬ 
turing town. A large proportion of the population 
there is sunk in deep ignorance, mental and moral; 
parents, indifferent themselves, have allowed their 
families to grow up in the same indifference; young 
men and young women are regardless of the decencies, 
not to speak of the amenities of life—working by day, and 
spending their evenings and Sundays in some unbecom¬ 
ing occupation or pastime. Not that ignorance reigns 
supreme over such a locality ; there are generally insti¬ 
tutions to be found in it, for the purpose of sharpening 
the intellect on political questions and speculative 
opinions in religion. The mental faculties of our manu¬ 
facturing operatives are for the most part quick and 
apprehensive, being whetted by much attrition ; subjects 
of discussion, economical, political and religious, are 
constantly brought before them, and are freely handled, 
producing a certain degree of intellectual acuteness, if 
not of logical accuracy. And when it is taken into 
account that a sense of hardship and oppression is rooted 
in the hearts of many, it is to be expected that their 
conclusions, when left to develop themselves, will not 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 341 


be on the side of order. Infidelity in religion and dis¬ 
affection in politics prevail to some considerable extent 
among such a populace. Then dissent of a certain 
eccentric kind has generally gained a footing there; 
probably there is a variety of religious denominations 
in the neighbourhood, but extravagant fanaticism is the 
type that prevails in all. A bold-hearted warrior then 
must he be who is willing to advance into that unpro¬ 
mising region, with the sword of the divine Word and 
under the banner of the Cross ! Yet will he not be 
without success, if he be fitted for the warfare. He 
will gather the young into his schools; he will collect 
a congregation into his church; he will find willing 
helpers among the people. There is a heartiness among 
our manufacturing populations which we seek for in 
vain in our country parishes; and it only wants draw¬ 
ing out. Who can wonder if the streams slumber in 
the rock, or are turned into a wrong channel, when 
there is no prophet to elicit or control the heart’s 
affections ? 

He therefore who would make an impression on such 
people must not be of the easy, self-indulgent, white- 
kid-glove school, but a hard-working, God-fearing, self- 
denying man. He must be intelligent and decided, as 
well as kind and conciliatory ; he must be resolute and 
unwearied, as well as cautious and discreet in his opera¬ 
tions. Above all, he must be free from silly crotchets and 
idle* whims : whether he rush into High-churchism with 
its pageantry, or into Low-churchism with its exclusive 
dogmas, or No-churchism with its negation of all positive 


342 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


faith, he is leaving his appointed work behind him, and 
mischief-making to humour his own fancies. Let him 
follow out in a broad and comprehensive spirit the 
evangelical duties he undertook when he bound him¬ 
self by his vows as a minister of our Church ; and he 
will not have to regret the estrangement of many from his 
fold by reason of his turbulent follies or doctrinal exclu¬ 
siveness. Surely he has enough on his hands without 
the gratuitous' creation of troubles. He is engaged, if a 
faithful workman, in visiting his sick and indigent 
people some hours each day; he is liable to fever from 
infection, and at all times to sickness and prostration 
from the ill-ventilated rooms in which he has to read 
and the noisome atmosphere he has to breathe; he has 
to superintend his day-schools assiduously; he has his 
cottage lectures to deliver; he has to attend to number¬ 
less calls upon him for numberless small objects; he has 
to be from home much and late in the evening, attending 
his night-schools, classes, lectures, committees, religious 
services, and meetings for various objects; he has to 
start many projects, and often to carry them out in the 
face of opposition ; he has to encounter rebuffs and 
reverses with a bold front; he has frequently to labour 
on in anxiety about the temporalities of life, balancing 
the increase of his family against the uncertainty, per¬ 
haps the decrease, of his income; and amidst these 
worrying and incessant cares he has to prepare his 
sermons and lectures for Sunday and week-day. How 
very different is it with the clergyman who has to 
breathe the pifre air and do the easy work of a country 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 343 


parish ! And yet, if a sincere and earnest labourer, the 
town pastor has much to cheer him which his rural 
brother lacks: he is encouraged by the support of many 
a strong will, gladdened by the sympathy of many a 
warm heart, and urged on to a further career of self¬ 
devotedness by the very presence of those whom he has 
won from the slavery of sin to the freedom of a Christian 
life. 

How far an extension of orders in our Church might 
increase its efficiency in operating upon the masses of 
our people has engaged, and is engaging, the attention 
of thoughtful and pious men. It is maintained by some 
that the appointment of suffragan bishops over the whole 
country would infuse a vitality into parochial ministra¬ 
tions, and give a cohesiveness to our ecclesiastical sys¬ 
tem. # Our present bishops, it is said, are too remote 
from their clergy generally to lend them any material 
aid, and to encourage them by their countenance and 
active co-operation. We very much doubt whether any 
extension of the episcopate would have such an influ¬ 
ence. The incumbent of a parish must ever be the centre 
from which spiritual life throughout it either waxes or 
wanes; and no suffragan bishop need infuse an addi¬ 
tional glow where the fire is burning,—no suffragan 

[* We remember that this project of suffragan bishops was 
the staple idea at the meeting of the Church Congress in Man¬ 
chester, 1863. If a clergyman undertook to speak on any topic 
whatever, there was a primd facie probability that, before he had 
travelled very far on his oratorical path, he would encounter the 
suffragan bishops.—1866.] 


344 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


bishop can impart life where there is the stillness of 
death. It is here as everywhere,—vitality must have 
its rise within ; it can only be very slightly acted on 
by extraneous influences. We mean not to say that a 
suffragan bishop might not be a kind and encouraging 
friend,—though we are far from certain that he might 
not be the reverse; but, be this as it may, we see not 
what especial want he is to supply, or of what great ad¬ 
vantage he would be found. If an incumbent is to 
make himself felt in the management of a parish, he 
must be self-reliant; he must not shrink from responsi¬ 
bility; he must not have to run for advice on every 
trivial emergency; he must have mind to think, and 
decision to act. Thus, we think that Church congresses, 
decanal meetings, and clerical societies, are useful as 
bringing men together who are engaged in the same high 
calling, and enabling them to offer to each other the 
word of encpuragement, and to draw closer the bonds of 
friendly intercourse; but we do not think that a clear 
head and a strong will ever carried home a new purpose 
from such gatherings : decrepit minds, it is true, want 
mental crutches; but we never could find out with what 
line and rule, and chisel and plane, it is possible to 
construct these much-needed supports. 

On the revival of lay orders in our Church we look 
with much more favour, for in it we see a definite use 
and the supply of an obvious want. We hear the clergy 
sometimes speaking exultingly on platforms of their per¬ 
severing parochial visitations; and we give them great 
credit for their vigorous action, though their descrip- 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES . 345 


tions, addressed adpopulum, may be somewhat too rose- 
coloured. But what we want to understand is this, in 
its plain, ungilded matter-of-fact,—Can a clergyman 
with a population of six or eight thousand visit syste¬ 
matically from house to house ? Can he hold regularly 
his meetings in schools, cottages, and appointed rooms, 
in order to collect together small congregations for prayer 
and exposition of Scripture, as a means of inducing them 
to attend the larger assembly at the church ? He may 
with a new-born zeal do it for a time ; but he cannot 
continue it very long, except it be to the injury of his 
health or the neglect of his other duties. We have seen 
already how fully his time is occupied; and if he can 
visit in succession the members of his congregation, call 
upon those in his parish occasionally who might be ex¬ 
pected to join his congregation, attend assiduously his 
sick, and look to those requiring his immediate care, he 
must be content with this, as a rule of daily action. Our 
clergy ought to be mindful not to neglect their prepara¬ 
tion for the pulpit. It may please an editor of the ‘ Times ’ 
to say that the composition of a sermon involves no 
more trouble than the scribbling over two or three 
sheets of note-paper; but this is not correct. It is very 
easy to write a sermon, we know; it is by no means 
easy to write a good one, we also know. The subject 
matter being so trite and common, if it be treated after 
a trite and common fashion, the manufacture is neces¬ 
sarily a very thin and threadbare kind of article; it is 
consequently needful to write with much thought and 
careful study, that if there must needs be platitudes they 


346 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


may be disguised, and the dry bones may be raised up 
into fleshly form and beauty of colour. The clergyman, 
therefore, ought to have some time at his disposal 
throughout the week for study and writing, atid a too 
heavy burden of parochial work ought not to be laid on 
his shoulders. 

And now lay agency comes into requisition. The 
Scripture-reader has done good service in working 
among the lower classes of our populous districts, nor 
in any case should we wish to dispense with him ; but 
he is, after all, without any definite status in the Church 
system, and bound by no guarantee that he may not 
change his occupation at any time. We can therefore 
discover no reasons against, but many for, a revival of 
the order of subdeacons in the Church of England. 
We would confine them to the specific duties of house- 
to-house visitation, reading and expounding the Scrip¬ 
tures to the poor, and conducting religious worship in 
rooms appointed for the purpose : we would be careful 
to give a definiteness and distinctiveness to their engage¬ 
ments. When a workman has frequently to leave one 
employment and attend to another, he rarely succeeds 
in both, and he has ever an excuse for neglect in the 
distracting character of his occupations. Lay down a 
plain, undeviating, circumscribed rule of daily labour, 
and there is no excuse if it be not faithfully performed. 
Then, after a certain number of years, let the subdea¬ 
con be eligible for the higher orders of the ministry, if 
he has been faithful in his subordinate office, and has 
prepared himself sufficiently for taking part in celebrat- 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASHES. 347 


ing the public services of the Church. The institution 
of such an order would be simply the revival of an 
agency which the Church recognised and found useful, 
in those early times when Romish doctrines and prac¬ 
tices had not as yet begun to make encroachments on 
the primitive simplicity of the Christian faith. 

The School. 

In considering the influences that can be brought to 
bear upon our working classes, the educational ones 
must be ranked side by side with those more directly 
religious. As an auxiliary to the Church, or rather as 
one of its subordinate agencies, we must give the School 
the most prominent place. For many years back the 
subject of education has been much discussed—in par¬ 
liament, in the press, and in popular assemblies; va¬ 
rious are the schemes that have been propounded for its 
advancement; royal commissions have been issued to 
make enquiry on the question ; so that many entertain 
an apprehension lest the thriving stripling may be 
stunted by the pressure of too many parliamentary 
wrappings and personal endearments; and they almost 
imagine that it would expand into fuller growth, if left 
with freer limbs, fewer appliances of clothing, a less 
formal dietary, and reduced doses from the state phy¬ 
sician. 

But, be that as it may, the progress of education 
among our working classes has been undoubted, since 
we last wrote on this subject in ‘Fraser’s Magazine.’* 

* February 1849, voL i. p. 41. 


348 MOEAL LEV EE AGE FOE THE MASSES. 


That was a happy idea, with whomsoever it originated, 
out of which were elaborated the memorable 1 Minutes 
of Council,’ sanctioned by Parliament in 1847. The 
measure was violently opposed by the dissenting inte¬ 
rests both in the House of Commons and in the country; 
but never was there a more judicious and impartial 
one: to Churchmen and Nonconformists it spoke the 
same language and offered the same terms. Nor can it 
be denied that these 4 Minutes,’ as the mainspring of the 
system, have been all along carrying out the object and 
achieving the purpose for which they were intended. 
Let any one, not as a theorist but as an eye-witness, 
compare our schools now in their number and efficiency 
with their condition twenty years ago, and he will not 
require the aid of Blue Books or statistics for his en¬ 
lightenment. Not that the educational stream has 
flowed on altogether unruffled; the blasts of contro¬ 
versy have swept along its surface; the battle of the 
Codes is yet ringing in our ears. Still we have faith 
in the issue : indignation gatherings and stormy dis¬ 
cussions are but the electric flashes that purify the at¬ 
mosphere. When we take a survey of our manufac¬ 
turing districts, and visit the National schools there, 
and when we find, wherever we ramble—in the crowded 
town, in the straggling village, in the lately formed 
colony stretching along the hill-side or the valley— 
well-managed day schools, with their certificated mas¬ 
ters and mistresses, their neat, intelligent, industrious 
pupil-teachers, their scholars disciplined and orderly, 
we cannot shut our eyes or darken our minds to the 


MOBAL LEVEBAGE FOB THE MASSES. 349 


truth, that a great agency has been and is at work_ 

that it has been exercising an increasing influence— 
and that, in all moral probability, it will not lose its 
vigour, but advance onward as a young giant rejoicing 
to run its course, an embodiment of blessing and power. 

The question of a free education by means of a rate 
is one which has divided public opinion for some years 
back, and has elicited considerable warmth of expression. 
When the ‘ Minutes of Council ’ were introduced into 
the House of Commons, they were opposed by the Non¬ 
conformists on the broad and intelligible principle, that 
voluntary efforts were quite sufficient for supplying the 
educational wants of the people, and that any interfer¬ 
ence of the government was constitutionally wrong. 
The measure however passed; and the wheel of time 
had scarcely completed another revolution when a new 
and startling scheme was propounded, one to which 
we have previously directed attention in these pages.’* 
It was entitled ‘ a Plan for the establishment of a general 
system of secular education in the county of Lancaster.’ 
Voluntary efforts were ignored as utterly insufficient; 
the necessary funds were to be supplied by a county rate. 
Now, whence did this scheme originate ? Comically 
enough, it emanated from the dissenters and liberals of 
Manchester. There was a dash of pleasantry too in its 
regulations, scarcely consistent with the grim and severe 
temperaments of its framers. ‘ A county board of edu¬ 
cation shall be established,’ it was stipulated , 1 consisting 
of twelve persons, of whom not more than three shall he 


* Yol. i. p. 57 


350 MOBAL LEVEE AGE FOB THE MASSES. 


members of any one religious denomination.' Then 
comes the committee for selecting the school-books, to 
be appointed by the county board,—a commission con¬ 
sisting of nine individuals, 1 no two of whom shall be 
members of the same religious denomination; and in 
order that the peculiar tenets of no religious sect may be 
favoured , the unanimous concurrence of the commission 
shall be required in the selection .’ That select party of 
nine never met: if they had, we might have chronicled 
their proceedings. What exciting scenes would have 
enlivened that committee-room ! There the Unitarian 
merchant would have sat side by side with the Muggle- 
tonian baker; there the Independent manufacturer 
would have shouldered the Jumping dealer in pickled 
herrings ; there the Swedenborgian chemist would have 
jostled the Johanna Southcotian greengrocer; there 
the Banting vendor of those miscellaneous wares called 
marine stores would have greeted fraternally the Dipper 
tinman; there Socialist and Chartist, Anythingarian 
and Nothingarian, Quaker, New-connectionist, and 
Particular Baptist,—all would have met together to 
agree upon a scheme of instruction, and to direct a 
machinery which was to influence millions for good or 
for evil, in time and in eternity. We suspect, forsooth, 
that an assembly composed of such materials would 
either have evanesced by spontaneous combustion or 
been self-devoured like the Kilkenny cats. What 
should we have found in the committee-room as the 
reliquice Danaum ? Perhaps the broad brim of the 
Quaker might have been strewn in fragments in one 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 351 


comer, the beard of the Johanna Southcotian might 
have lain dishevelled in a second, and the thigh bone of 
the vigorous Jumper might have been scattered pro¬ 
miscuously in the third; but we fear the disjecta 
membra would scarcely have supplied recognisable 
materials out of which the Borough Coroner could have 
extracted his guinea. 

The measure, we need hardly say, was violently 
opposed by the' members of our Church generally; and 
when Mr. Fox’s Bill, which was the Lancashire plan 
dressed up in a decent suit of clothes, was brought into 
the House of Commons in 1850, several city meetings 
were held in Manchester, which were signalised by 
their turbulence. The bill after no long time was 
decently buried; and the days of mourning for it were 
scarcely over when another educational scheme was 
born, having its parentage among the Church party,— 
at the first sight a more pleasing specimen of its order 
than the former. Besides, it came into the world with 
fairer auspices; its accoucheurs were practitioners of 
higher status; its baby linen was of finer texture; clerical 
dignitaries with aprons on assisted in performing the 
christening ceremony; and its sponsors pledged its 
health in champagne. The principle, however, of the 
two bills was the same,—a free education by means of 
a rate : the Church egg was genteelly laid in the Dis¬ 
senting nest. 

'It would not be worth while to dissect a measure 
which has been so long dead ; it is enough to say that 
it contained most of the conflicting elements of the 


352 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


Lancashire school plan. A rate was to be laid; and a 
sub-committee, chosen from the town council, was to have 
the distribution of the money collected. Then followed 
the inevitable confusion in matters of management and 
inspection, and in the subjects of instruction, the chief 
powers being vested in committees and sub-committees 
appointed from the municipal body. A somewhat amus¬ 
ing idea, through whosesoever brain it first scintiJlated, 
to make the members of a town council the presiding 
deities over the practical working of our National 
schools ! We would back the members of our Corpo¬ 
ration against the world for the performance of those 
duties with which they are conversant. One of them 
has a keen discernment in opening out thoroughfares 
and pulling down obstructive gable ends; another is 
skilful in the art of paving and on the merits of 
Derbyshire flags and Welsh ‘sets; ’ another can put 
his regiment of scavengers through their exercise as 
scientifically as a field-marshal; another will illuminate 
you on the properties of gas, and discourse wisely on 
the subject of meters; another'is deep in the subter¬ 
ranean mysteries of tunnelling; another is a keen detec¬ 
tive of a nuisance, looking black upon the dense volumes 
of smoke that issue from our lofty chimneys, turning * 
up his nose at a manure heap, threatening with the 
rope the innocent but unprotected poodle, and waging 
an unceasing war on the pigstye with its happy, unof¬ 
fending inmates; another has a discriminating scent, 
even from afar, for those Stygian, odoriferous streams 
which flow sluggishly down the sewers, over which in 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 353 


conjunction with Cloacina he so ably presides. We 
give them all due credit for the exercise of those gifts 
which undeniably they possess; but we doubt much 
whether their antecedent occupations would have af-^ 
forded them sufficient experience in the special character 
of educationists, or imparted to them that keen sensi¬ 
bility of feeling which would have been needful in 
carrying out a delicate process of school-management.* 

The problem, therefore, still remains practically un¬ 
solved—How far a free education by rate or otherwise 
would be a boon to our operative classes and a blessing 
to the country ? 

To any one who has attentively observed the condition 
of our dense town populations, the question that presents 
itself is—What can be done with the lowest and most 
degraded classes among them? Are you to give them 
up as hopeless ? If the old and hardened be impene¬ 
trable, can you not do something for the young? The 
reply is ready—educate them. The advice is very 

[* We mean no disrespect to the members of the Manchester 
Corporation; they devote themselves, almost universally, with 
great energy and zeal to their duties ; and the warmest thanks 
of the citizens are due to them for undertaking what is often only 
a thankless office. Still, we would not intrust to them the 
management of our National schools, as now existing. We 
should be glad to give up to them the control of that order of 
school, if it should ever be established, where the attendance was 
without payment and at the same time compulsory. Here the 
civil power would have to be summoned into exercise ; and we 
know not in what body it could be more fittingly vested than in 
the Corporation of a borough.—1866.] 

VOL. I. A A 


354 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


proper ; but the further question meets you—How get 
them within your schools ? Give them a free education, 
some one answers. But even if you offer that induce¬ 
ment, will the most neglected of the young be brought 
under instruction ? 

We are ourself by no means the advocate of a free 
education, as a general measure. However we look at 
it, as applied to our present system of National schools, 
we can discover but little advantage in it, while its 
points of inefficiency are palpable enough. Would it 
increase the aggregate of instruction imparted ? It may 
seem to some almost a paradox, but we believe that the 
number of scholars gratuitously taught would scarcely 
exceed that at present in our National schools, unless 
some further influence were brought to bear on negligent 
families. If boys and girls between the ages of four and 
eleven be not at a school when trade is in a normal state 
of prosperity, it is as a rule from want of will rather than 
of means, on the part of those whose duty it is to send 
them. In connection with most schools there is at pre¬ 
sent a provision for admitting gratuitously those whose 
parents are very poor; but such free scholars are inva¬ 
riably found to be the most irregular in attendance and 
the most unmanageable in behaviour. Is a system of elee¬ 
mosynary education, again, consistent with our English 
tone of feeling ? Our firm conviction is, that the well- 
ordered, honest operative would rather pay a trifling 
sum weekly for the schooling of his sons and daughters 
than claim it like a pauper’s dole; and he would cer¬ 
tainly value it more highly. What can be more unwise 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


355 


than to lessen, even by one element, a parent’s interest 
in the welfare of his children ? What more influential 
for good than to encourage and foster those feelings of 
watchfulness and forethought which are brought into 
exercise by the provision he makes for their mental and 
moral improvement ? It is through the instinct of pa¬ 
rental affection that the father and mother are to be 
disciplined no less than their family. In reference also 
to the subjects of instruction, a system of free schools 
would involve endless discussion. For our own part, 
we have often regretted the pertinacity with which dis¬ 
tinctive creeds and formularies have been fought over; 
but a gratuitous education by rate precludes all religious 
subjects whatever; according to the plainest logical 
conclusion, it must be purely secular. The Romanist, 
the Jew, the Socialist, and other parties, would object 
in toto to instruction from the New Testament; nay, 
some would not be permitted to attend where scriptural 
topics were introduced at all. And would not such a 
scheme also involve much confusion in the management of 
the schools ? The clergyman or minister now exercises 
a personal and active superintendence over his own, 
and may be supposed to visit them regularly; but his 
interest would eertainly diminish from the frequent and 
troublesome interference from without to which he 
would be subject. Viewed too in relation to the house¬ 
holders, we believe that an educational rate would be 
fou*nd a grievance. The rich would not suffer, for pro¬ 
bably they now pay voluntarily more than the amount 
at which they would be rated; but the smaller shop- 
A A 2 


356 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


keepers and thriving workpeople would feel it. Many 
parents in this station of life now send their children to 
private schools, or those of a higher class than the Na¬ 
tional, where the weekly payment varies perhaps from 
sixpence to a shilling; and many more would most 
likely do so, if a free system were established. The 
complaint of such therefore would be, that they had to 
pay out of their industry for what they could not share, 
and to provide for those who might be equally respect¬ 
able as themselves, but have neither the same prudence 
nor self-respect. 

But while we would discourage any attempt to engraft 
a free education on our present system of National schools, 
we are confident that there is a certain class in our large 
towns upon which no moral impression whatever can be 
made, unless its younger members be brought within 
the influence of discipline; and we are equally sure that 
no plan for that purpose can be in the least availing, 
unless the school be free and at the same time the at¬ 
tendance compulsory. * A stranger who saw no more 
than the surface of our populous cities could have but 
little conception of that dense mass of ignorance, vice, 
and crime, which is sweltering and festering in the lowest 
layer of the community. He would see evidences of 
wealth under every aspect—in the palatial warehouse, 
the gigantic factory, the magnificent public building, 

[* Many years ago we pointed out in Fraser's Magazine (vol. i. 
p. 82), the impossibility of attracting to our schools by persua¬ 
sion the children of many among the poor in our large towns.— 
1866.] 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 357 


the gorgeous shop, the attractive suburban villa with its 
tastefully arranged gardens, greenhouses,and lawns; he 
might descend to a lower grade of society, and mix with 
the warehousemen, clerks, and retail dealers; nay, he 
might visit at their homes the mechanic, the artisan, and 
the decent mill-operative; and after all he might gain 
no insight into the wretchedness that lies lower still. 
Few seek to penetrate this sunless abyss of misery, when 
not called upon to do so; and they who do so profes¬ 
sionally strive to forget as soon as possible the scenes 
they have witnessed there. Enter that noisome room 
in this back alley. It is Sunday morning, about eleven 
o’clock. What do you find ? You see a man and his 
wife—if she be his wife—and some four or five children 
from twelve years of age downwards. There is scarcely 
an article of furniture in the place for the most ordinary 
convenience; the household stock consists of a few stools, 
a table without a leg, some broken pots, a damaged 
kettle, and a litter of flock covered with a kind of rug 
in one corner, on which the family lie at night. The 
father is just recovering from a drunken carouse, and 
the mother, with a child at her breast and a black eye, 
seems half-intoxicated; the children are rolling or run¬ 
ning about, apparently unconscious of the wretchedness 
of everything around them. Is this misery the result 
of unavoidable want or of downright vice ? Instances 
may be met with, it is true, where destitution is beyond 
human control; but here, and most frequently, it springs 
out of positive mental and moral debasement. The fa¬ 
ther and the mother are lost to all shame; the fierceness 


353 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


of brutalized humanity is engrafted in their character 
on the sensual propensities of the brute; no ray of 
moral sensibility seems to glimmer into their hearts; 
conscience is obliterated; all idea of parental responsi¬ 
bility has passed from their mind and memory. How 
do these beings, scarcely human, spend their days ? The 
father is a hawker, it may be, or engaged in some such 
irregular employment, and makes by his calling enough 
to keep his family in decency; but he drinks his earnings, 
often in company with his wife, when they fight like 
savages. The children go out for a livelihood, and em¬ 
ploy themselves in begging, picking pockets, selling 
matches, thieving from shops and stalls, tumbling by the 
side of omnibuses, or some such professional avocation. 
Why, here you see a nest out of which the young crime 
of the country is fledged and wings its way in various 
directions. Vice, unillumined by the faintest ray of 
moral sense, is stereotyped upon the hearts of those chil¬ 
dren before they are ten years of age. They are not 
ignorant indeed that they are doing something contrary 
to the laws of society, when they steal; for the sight of 
the magistrate and the policeman, of whom they are es¬ 
pecially observant, teaches them that truth; but the 
child who has spent from his fifth year to his tenth in 
begging, lying, pilfering, and eluding the police, has no 
more sense of right and wrong for their own sake than 
the monkey, which thinks everything its own, if it can 
escape the lash of the keeper.* 

[* But this, it may be said, is a solitary instance of domestic 
wretchedness and parental neglect ? By no means ; households 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 359 


Now, to offer a free education to this lowest class of 
children is simply an absurdity; indeed, restraint in any 

of this kind may be reckoned by hundreds—may we not say, 
by thousands ?—in our largest towns. Manchester has of late 
been deluged with discussion on the number of children in the 
city who are too young for work, and yet attend no day school. 
It has been computed that of those between three and thir¬ 
teen years of age, in Manchester and Salford, more than one- 
half are to be ranked in this category. We do not pin our faith 
implicitly to the returns of education agents and amateur statistic 
gatherers ; but the number is certainly large enough to startle 
any one who has never seriously reflected on the question. The 
Eoyal Commissioners on popular education also, in their report 
published in 1861, arrived at a similar conclusion, when the en¬ 
quiry was extended over the counties of Lancashire and Cheshire. 
Some twelve months ago the Manchester Statistical Society 
selected, as an average specimen of a low district, a certain area 
of the city covered with about 800 inhabited buildings, including 
cellars, and undertook to visit the families that lived there. In 
the whole district there were 1,977 children at home, of whom 
774 were over twelve years of age, and 1,203 under; of these, 438, 
or about 22 per cent., attended a day school, and 691, or 34 per 
cent., a Sunday school. The number of those over three years 
old, who were found to be neither at a day school nor at work, 
was 577, or 29 per cent. In this promiscuous mass of human 
beings, it must not be supposed that all were very poor ; many 
no doubt were extremely so, from one cause or another; but the 
statistics of the society show, that of nine families the earnings 
severally were 21. a week; of 255, 11. 6s. 4 d.; of 228, 18s. 0 \d.; 
and that the average weekly income of the whole district was 
16s. Id. In such a locality as this there will be found, it is true, 
a great variety in the character of the households; but these 
statements only confirm the testimony of our personal observa¬ 
tion, that the family picture drawn above would, with some 
slight modifications, find very many counterparts in this section 
of the town alone.—1866.] 


360 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


shape would be as intolerable to them as to the Arab of 
the desert; and any curtailment of their freedom would 
be equally obnoxious to their parents, who profit by 
their depredations. But, by compelling them to be edu¬ 
cated, you benefit the father and mother as well as 
their family. You deprive them of ill-gotten gains, and 
you bring them also within the observation and control 
of the law. When we hear men of advanced sentiments 
denouncing compulsion in such a case as an abstract in¬ 
justice, we can only regard their assertion as one of those 
flimsy, self-conceited dogmas which, if carried to their 
logical conclusion, would entirely dislocate society. If 
a man is breaking the laws of the land and inflicting 
injury on his fellow-creatures, you restrain him; if with 
a settled purpose he is bringing up his family to do the 
same, why should you not compel him to desist ? If a 
father is brandishing a carving knife, and on the point 
of thrusting it into the hearts of his children, you stay 
his hand by force; if with his eyes open he is urging 
them on to perdition, why should you not interfere by 
legal enactment to prevent it ? 

That a scheme might be devised for bringing the 
lowest class of children within the range of a free and 
compulsory education we do not doubt; nor do we be¬ 
lieve that the ratepayers generally would be reluctant 
to contribute their quota towards this object. The Re¬ 
formatory would operate most effectually for good upon 
our juvenile vagrants. At present the young can only 
pass into such an institution from the gates of the prison ; 
but why should the door of the Refuge be closed to all 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 361 


but those who have graduated as convicted criminals ? 
To remove the child from the demoralizing influence of 
home would be the first step towards reclaiming it. 
But where the Reformatory could not be provided, let 
there be schools set apart exclusively for the lowest 
grade of the juvenile population, and let there be a 
strict supervision over their homes. By such means 
crime would certainly be prevented to a great extent, 
and many a child entering on the path of ruin would 
be turned into the way of honesty, industry, and use¬ 
fulness. In speaking of such schemes, people talk about 
the 1 religious element ’ as a stumbling-block before 
their feet. The i religious element’! Would any one 
with a mind ranging above the asinine, battle about a 
form of worship over a sample of brutalized humanity 
which he wished to humanize ? 

Indeed, with our present educational machinery much 
more might be effected in the way of indirect compulsion 
than is now done. The law might enforce a more vigi¬ 
lant supervision over the schooling of those who are 
working short time in our factories; it might be made 
imperative on the Guardians of the poor to see that the 
children of out-door paupers were not only taught, but 
well taught; a certain proficiency in the rudiments of 
learning might be made a condition for each boy or girl 
before admission to many employments in our large 
towns. It is time the difficulty should be bravely met; 
for’until direct compulsion be brought to bear sternly 
on our most degraded families, and an indirect pressure 
of a stricter kind than is now applied be laid upon 


362 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


others immediately above the lowest, our educational 
efforts will never head and stem the surge of demorali¬ 
zation which is ever sweeping onward down the stream 
of time into a darkly looming future.* 

[* In 1864 an Association was formed in Manchester, called 
‘ The Education Aid Society,’ which has ever since been pursuing 
its useful course. It is under the direction of laymen alone— 
laymen of various religious denominations ; its funds are raised 
from personal contributions; and it dispenses them in supplying 
a free education to such children as come under its regulations. 
It is entirely unsectarian, and it engages to pay the school fee of 
any child where the weekly earnings of the family do not amount 
to 35. a head, after rent has been deducted; it makes no stipula¬ 
tion about the school, only it must be in connection with some 
recognised religious denomination, and be approved on inspection, 
as being equal to its work. The society is now paying for the 
education of several thousand children collected from the very 
poorest class, and is so far supplementing the ordinary action 
of our day schools. Still, so far from disproving, the experience 
of the Association seems to us rather to confirm the propriety of 
the suggestions we have made above. We subjoin a few extracts 
from its last report, 1866, premising that its statistics are confir¬ 
matory of Government reports—that, of the youth of our country 
who come under instruction, a vast majority are found in the 
Church of England schools. 

‘The results of this investigation (a canvass for scholars 
carried on through a certain portion of the town) hitherto ob¬ 
tained are singularly uniform. Everywhere a majority of the 
children between the ages of three and twelve years, are found 
to be neither at school nor at work.’ 

* Another most important fact ascertained in the course of this 
canvass is that in many districts the number of children who 
are not sent to school, but whose parents are able to pay school 
fees if they were willing, approaches very nearly to the number 
of those who are neglected in consequence of poverty. Indeed, 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 363 


On a former occasion, but now many years ago, 
we stated our opinion of the Sunday school in these 

in one exceptionally prosperous district, where there were found 
142 children not at school, there were only 31 whose parents 
could be considered as unable to pay fees; the remaining 111 
were children of parents able to pay fees, but there was no 
school very near, and the parents were careless about education. 
From this investigation, so far as it has gone, it appears that 
the number of children who are not at school, but whose parents 
could pay school fees if they would, is 2,175 ; while the children 
of parents who are unable to pay are 3,612.’ 

‘Altogether 7,650 families with children have been visited in 
the course of the canvass. These families consist of 37,975 
persons; the number of children of all ages living with parents 
or guardians was 23,988. Of these there were— 

7,804 above twelve years of age ; 

11,086 between three and twelve years of age; 

5,098 under three years of age. 

‘Of the 7,804 above twelve, there were only 112 at school. 
There were 6,424 at work; and 1,268 neither at school nor at 
work. 

‘Of the 11,086 between three and twelve, there were 762 at 
work; 4,537 at school; and 5,787 neither at school nor at 
work. Taking the total of children of all ages above three, 
living with parents or guardians, there were only 4,649 at 
school; while there were 7,055 neither at school nor at work. 
The remainder were at work. Thus in every 100 children living 
with parents or guardians, who are not at work, there are 40 at 
school, and 60 not at school.’ 

‘Not more than a tenth of the area of Manchester and Salford 
hag been canvassed as yet. Some of the worst and most populous 
districts have been hitherto avoided, because so large a propor¬ 
tion of the people are below the reach of the Society’s means of 
influence. In the lowest districts only a small proportion of 
the children could be got into schools by any agency which we 


364 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


pages,* and we have never found reason to withdraw 
what we then wrote, in any essential matter. Against the 
Sunday school there was at that time, as we said, a 
degree of prejudice in some minds ; and now we regret 
to say that it is regarded perhaps with still less favour. 
Among the clergy even, many speak disparagingly of it 
—they especially whose notions verge towards absolut¬ 
ism in management. And we are far from meaning to 
say that circumstances do not occur in connection with 
it, which are calculated to try the clergyman’s temper 
and shock his feelings. Some empty-headed, conceited, 
noisy young man may gather a party around him and 
create much dissension. Some conductor, instead of 
working with, may work against his pastor. In institu¬ 
tions carried on altogether by voluntary agency, such 
embarrassments from time to time can hardly be matters 
of surprise ; but when prudence and caution prevail in 
the management they will be very rare; and even 
when they do occur they may be suppressed without 
much difficulty. If an aptitude to control and guide be 
united in the clergyman with a delicacy and gentleness 
in the exercise of it, he will always have adequate sup¬ 
port. He may not himself, however, be always free 

could use. There are few schools in the localities, and parents 
and children are alike unimpressible. In canvassing a tenth 
part of Manchester and Salford, however, as has just been stated, 
there were found 7,055 children of all ages above three, who 
were neither at school nor at work, and 5,787 of these were 
between three and twelve.’—1866.] 

* Vol. i. p. 64, February 1849. 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 365 


from blame : while some turbulent manager or teacher 
may occasionally produce mischief in his school, it is 
by no means improbable that he may himself provoke 
opposition at times by harshness of tone or want of 
judgment. 

A Sunday school, we admit, is far from being a per¬ 
fect institution; but in our manufacturing districts 
especially it supplies a want which without it would be 
unsupplied. It has its weak points; but even these are 
fewer and less damaging than its opponents would allege. 
Your older scholars, it is asserted, do not come together 
so much for instruction as for a pleasant pastime. This 
is far from being correct as a rule, though unquestionably 
many look to their school as a place of agreeable recrea¬ 
tion among their companions. The poor have but few 
opportunities of social intercourse at their homes, and 
they are consequently driven to seek them abroad. But 
your young men and women—and this is brought 
forward as a grave charge—only come to school to 
catch wives and husbands, and to carry on their court¬ 
ships. There is some truth doubtless in this statement, 
and the amatory propensities are never unattended by 
danger ; but youths and maidens, we presume, do court 
in all grades of society, and among our working classes 
it is better that they should make their selections 
from a Sunday school than a singing saloon. But 
how many of your scholars turn out bad characters ! 
Out of every hundred from the poorer children in our 
manufacturing districts ninety have passed through a 
Sunday school, though a considerable proportion may 


366 MOBAL LEVEBAGE FOB THE MASSES. 


have attended only two or three times, and all are classed 
in prison registers as scholars. Is it strange, then, that 
many such are found in our gaols ? Do the children of the 
higher classes, with all their advantages, turn out with¬ 
out exception respectable characters ? But your scholars, 
as they marry and leave school, are never seen within 
the walls of your church. This is true frequently, but 
it is by no means universally so. Many are Confirmed 
from the Sunday school, become Communicants, and 
remain steadily attached to their place of worship after 
they are married, living in respectability and comfort, 
and doing their duty conscientiously in the state of life 
to which Providence has called them. Some exalt 
unduly the influence of the Sunday school; others 
ignore it altogether. This wide diversity of sentiment 
may spring out of individual experience or idiosyncrasy; 
but, amidst all discussions on the subject, it must 
ever be taken into consideration as the main element 
in the problem, that the success of each particular 
school is in a great degree dependent on personal 
management: if it be judiciously conducted, it will 
be an instrument for good; if loosely, neither in itself 
nor in its results can it be contemplated with un- 
mixed satisfaction, if with any satisfaction at all. 

Indeed, we scarcely doubt but that the Sunday school 
might be made to achieve a greater amount of good than 
it has yet done. It should be under the management 
and control of a single person, whether clergyman or 
layman—a man of sound judgment, of kindly temper, 
and at the same time of firm purpose. Unless he 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 367 


maintain a strict, while courteous, discipline, the ma¬ 
chinery will soon get out of order. The school 
should not be unwieldy in size; it is far better to 
perfect its organisation than to collect into it crowds 
disproportioned to the population of the parish. The 
main difficulty of the governing superintendent lies in 
the inaptitude or incompetence of teachers. He must 
therefore select the most promising scholars, form them 
into a class, and instruct them in the art of teaching; 
he must show them how necessary it is to interest the 
young, and to stir up their minds by putting questions 
and soliciting answers, rather than to hum them asleep 
by a prosy sermon. The teachers too must be ex¬ 
amples ; they must be punctual in their attendance 
at school, seen in their seats at church, present at the 
Lord’s table; they must consider it a duty to visit 
the homes of their scholars, to enquire into their wants 
with delicacy, to cheer their families with sympathy, 
and to aid them as far as their means will allow. The 
school hours ought not to be long, and no time should 
be frittered away in tedious prayers, in prosy addresses 
from the desk, in a needless interchange of compliments, 
or in a promiscuous shaking of hands. The work 
of instruction must be carried on, mind to mind and 
heart to heart, between the teacher and the class— 
herein lies the touchstone of success. Avoid all 
childish hymns, except for the very young—they 
raise and perpetuate ridiculous notions in minds ad¬ 
vancing to maturer thought. Let the services of the 
school be as much as possible assimilated to those of 


368 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


the church with which it is connected, in the hymns 
and prayers, as well as in general sentiment and tone. 
Only take those scholars to public worship who are old 
enough to enter into its spirit. Be careful to dissociate, 
so far as you can, everything of a secular nature from 
the operations of the school. We doubt much whether 
such Associations as Bands of Hope, Mutual Improve¬ 
ment Societies, Singing Classes, Building Clubs, and 
such like, do. not distract the minds of teachers and 
scholars from the one simple object they should keep 
in view. Sick Societies, Funeral Societies, Penny 
Banks, Free Libraries, are useful adjuncts to a Sunday 
school; but let the business to be transacted in connec¬ 
tion with them be kept carefully distinct from the hours 
and work of teaching. Let there be no loiterers, no su¬ 
pernumeraries—for one idle lounger makes many. Let 
your teachers’ meetings be useful and practical—-not 
merely opportunities for the pouring forth of dull 
speeches and irrelevant talk. If a clergyman were to 
devote himself fairly to the perfecting of his Sunday 
school by these rules, and had an aptitude for the 
undertaking, he would certainly be repaid for his labour ; 
though we know well that it would involve a strain on 
his energies almost too great to be expected from one 
who is engaged in so many other harassing duties. 

The Ragged School , mostly held on a Sunday even¬ 
ing, is now very general in our manufacturing districts. 
It is opened for the lowest class of scholars—the young 
peripatetics of the streets, and those who may be too ill * 
clad to attend during the day. Contrary to what might 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 369 


have been expected, schools of this kind fill abundantly. 
A well-lighted room, warm and comfortable in winter, 
with the prospect of some lively badinage at the gather¬ 
ing, is a sufficient attraction to many of the wandering 
Arabs who are unemployed on a Sunday evening. And 
certainly the scenes that are sometimes enacted at their 
meetings are amusing enough. 1 Now, boys,’ we once 
heard a consequential superintendent say to an assem¬ 
blage of these youthful rovers ,— 1 now, boys, be still— 
ahem !—look at my watch ! ’ Here he held it up to 
their view, and was beginning to draw a moral from it 
on the value of time. ‘ By George, but it’s as big as a 
warming-pan !’ said one rough-headed, bull-necked lad. 

4 He geet it out o’ pawn last neet! ’ was the character¬ 
istic suggestion of another. ‘ I’ll lay a tizzie he prigged 
it!’ was the less charitable supposition of a third. How 
far the moral drawn from the debatable article had 
much effect, we could not judge. Institutions of this 
kind, when well conducted, have doubtless a consider¬ 
able influence on the class for which they are intended; 
but the great difficulty lies in procuring fitting managers 
and teachers for them. A superintendent here and there 
may be found who has a singular aptitude for subduing 
and civilising these outlaws of society, but the faculty 
is very rare; and if in the ordinary Sunday-school 
success be mainly dependent on management, the truth 
applies with far greater force to one where some hundreds 
are assembled, whose manners have never been subjected 
to restraint, and whose moral principles have been 
formed on a negation of the decalogue. 

VOL. I. BB 


370 MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 


In connection with the day and Sunday school that 
on the week-day evening ought never to be wanting. 
Most of the boys and girls in the manufacturing districts 
go to employment about thirteen at the latest, and at 
that age they can have merely mastered the rudiments 
of education. Indeed, what they have learned would 
soon pass from their memory, unless it were resuscitated 
and invigorated by some further course of instruction, 
however irregularly continued. The subjects taught 
on the week-day evening are mostly confined to writing, 
arithmetic, and sewing for girls. The first two are 
essential requisites, if youths are to improve their con¬ 
dition in life. In our bustling mercantile towns sharp 
boys have many openings whereby they may, slowly 
doubtless but surely, advance step by step to wealth 
and eminence; but unless they can write a fair hand 
and go through the ordinary arithmetical calculations, 
a barrier is raised at once against all progress. 

Of late years the Mechanics' Institute has almost been 
given up in public estimation, as a failure ; and certainly 
it has not answered the end for which it was designed. 
We have known indeed some of the purely mechanic 
class who have made their way to a good position in 
life through the aid they received there ; but as a rule 
such institutions can only be available for those who 
are of a grade above that of the artisan or the operative. 
The students who attend there are fonder, as we have 
generally found, ol skimming over the surface of a sub¬ 
ject than of mastering it from its rudiments; still we 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 371 


have met with instances, where youths by their own 
energy, in connection with evening classes and Mutual 
Improvement Societies, have attained to a very remark¬ 
able standard of literary and scientific ability. Besides, 
these Mechanics’ Institutes have been brought into 
much disrepute by the inflated representations of their 
committees and conductors : celebrated characters have 
been induced to come from far and deliver jubilant 
harangues and congratulatory addresses over their 
prosperity and health, which ought really to have been 
funeral orations over a decomposing carcase. Working 
Men's Clubs seem now to be in the course of formation 
on all sides, and to be superseding the Mechanics’ Insti¬ 
tute, as more congenial with the habits and tastes of our 
operatives. We do not profess to have any great ad¬ 
miration of them for our own part: it is better doubtless 
for a working man to spend his evening at such a club 
than at the beer-shop ; but we prefer to contemplate 
him, as he is taking his glass of ale and his pipe by his 
own fireside, with his wife and family around him, 
before they retire to rest. 

Such is the moral leverage that has been, and is now, 
brought into action in raising the masses of our people 
to a higher social position; and we are assured that it 
has not been wielded so energetically without producing 
an effect in some degree corresponding with the power 
employed. With mechanical forces, there is more pre¬ 
cision in their application and more certainty in their re¬ 
sults than with the moral; but the weight of resistance 

B £ 2 


372 MORAL LEVERAGE, FOR THE MASSES. 

must gradually yield to that leverage which is exer¬ 
cised on the human mind and heart, as well as to that 
which is brought to bear on ponderous substances 
in the material world. The moral progress among our 
people may not be so strikingly observable as we might 
desire; but we believe that it is decided and real. 
Growth in both the natural and spiritual world is an 
onward process, but so slow that it cannot be marked 
from day to day. Leaven among human masses can 
only work silently and imperceptibly; but it may not¬ 
withstanding be still fermenting and expanding. If we 
were to compare the present condition of our operative 
class with what it was forty years ago, the improvement 
in moral tone and domestic comfort would be found to 
be very decided. Not but that much still remains to 
be done before their state can be contemplated with 
satisfaction. There is a large body of them that seems 
to be beyond the reach of any force, except that of posi¬ 
tive compulsion. Still, in one way the most degraded 
of our town populations will come under a moral influ¬ 
ence, indirect and unobserved though it be. Morality 
descends as by a law of gravitation, and each class 
must have an improving influence on the one imme¬ 
diately below it in the social scale. Thus, we may 
expect that the personal example and daily life of our 
more decent operatives will leave some trace on that 
lowest grade of our people which seems to be almost 
hopeless of amelioration. Class must act upon class, 
individual upon individual, with a certain degree of 


MORAL LEVERAGE FOR THE MASSES. 373 


moral power; and we are not without hope that, how¬ 
ever imperceptible the process may be, the dews of 
grace and truth, transmitted through the superincumbent 
soil, may percolate in some small measure to the lowest 
stratum of social life. 


END OF THE FIRST VOLUME. 


IONBOB 

PBIWTBD BY SPOTTISWOODB ABB CO. 
NEW-STBBET SQUABE 


* 














CONTENTS 


OF 

THE SECOND VOLUME. 


PAGE 

I. The Manchester Art Exhibitions of 1857 . 1 

II. A Threnody as touching the East Wind . 46 

III. Our Failures: Commercial, Ecclesiastical, 

Parochial, and Oratorical . . .78 

IV. Hymns and Hymn-Tunes for Congrega¬ 

tional Worship. 135 

V. The Meeting in Manchester of the 
British Association for the Advance¬ 
ment of Science, 1861 .... 185 

VI. The Philosophy of Marriage, studied 

under Sir Cresswell Cresswell. . 223 

VII. Our Cotton Trade and Factory Opera¬ 

tives . .271 

VIII. Lancashire under a Cloud . . . 309 

. IX. The Cloud Dispersing. Postscript (1866). 349 



I. 


THE MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS 
OF 1857. 


Manchesteb, of a truth, attracts at all times its due 
share of observation. It brings forward great and 
comprehensive measures which startle timid easy-going 
gentlemen; it propounds mighty theories on many 
subjects. It has long been famous for its political 
school. Educational projects too spring up among us, 
and ‘ come like shadows, so depart.’ But during the 
present year Manchester has been the centre of attraction 
from an undertaking of a less debateable character. It 
is pleasing to reflect that our citizens could lay aside 
their combative characteristics for a time, and unite in 
promoting the success of a project which must of necessity 
have contributed to the enjoyment of millions. In the 
spring of the year the hurricane of political excitement 
swept over our city, stirring up from their depths the 
mujldy passions of men ; but in admiration of our 
great Exhibition which was opened soon after, political 
differences and social jealousies were merged; and we 


VOL. II. 


B 


2 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


believe that hands and hearts which had been for a 
while estranged, joined cordially around this grand 
trophy to the Genius of Peace. 

On a passing glance at our Lancashire characteristics, 
some might imagine that the people of Manchester 
would be the last to get up an Exhibition of Art Trea¬ 
sures. The Manchester merchant sets a high price 
upon his time; he rides in cabs, and says that it is to 
save time; he eats his dinner in haste, and gives as a 
reason that it is to economize time; he looks shy upon 
any lounging visitor in his warehouse, because such an 
one is threatening to waste his time ; he loves not to 
hold a conversation with you in the street on promis¬ 
cuous topics, such as the state of the weather or the 
- health of your wife and family—it is a loss of time. 
His very spring-carts along our thoroughfares, laden 
with his goods, seem to know his tastes; they are 
driven, certainly with a view not to the safety of life, 
but to the saving of time. Holla, there !—round 
the corner the vehicle steers at full trot; down goes 
that old woman with her market-basket; away drives 
the van, and the anile fragments are either taken 
to the infirmary or put down to the bill. If the pro¬ 
verb be true, that time is made for slaves, it is equally 
true that men may become the slaves of time. Or is it, 
that the effort and aim of our friend is to become its 
lord ? He cannot delay it, we know; he cannot stay 
or put back the finger on the dial of time; but he can 
make it bend to his will and further his wishes. More 
than any other man, he realises that abstraction called 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 3 


time; he invests it with a material mould and figure. 
Every beat of the chronometer is measured by current 
coin or bills at three months’ date. 

Then the ordinary employments of our Lancashire 
men of business are hardly such, we might imagine, as 
to foster a love for the fine arts. The manufacturer 
spends his days in a routine of duty that would not 
seem to nurture an elegant taste. His engines are 
rumbling within hearing ; unsavoury smells of oil and 
cotton greet his olfactory organs; looms and shuttles 
are rattling around him; bobbins by myriads are 
whirling before his eyes ; young females in long pina¬ 
fores are exercising their nimble fingers in the various 
processes through which his raw material is passing; 
and men with dirty faces and paper caps are engaged 
in their respective departments of the work. We can 
suppose the master studying the action of a newly- 
patented spindle, or testing his last purchase of cotton, 
or examining the quality of the manufactured article; but 
it would require a stretch of the imagination to picture 
him as imbued with a taste for those mere ornamental 
trickeries called the fine arts. Look, again, at the occu¬ 
pation of the merchant—the man, say, who is engaged 
strictly in the Manchester trade—the occupier of one 
of those palatial warehouses that decorate our city. He 
lives and moves and has his being in the midst of 
calicoes, and blankets, and flannel petticoats, and cordu¬ 
roys; or if he be in the fancy trade, his eye is refreshed 
by gayer articles and more brilliant colours; he is 
surrounded by artificial flowers, thunder and lightning 
b 2 


4 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 

silks, rainbow ribbons, and volcano prints. Still, 
whether he deal in domestics or lighter goods, we do 
not see at once that his thoughts are likely to wing 
their way from his place of business on any aerial flight 
into the atmosphere of imagination. That serious, long¬ 
headed individual, as he paces his -warehouse, you 
may depend on it, is musing not on a Titian or a 
Eubens, but on the state of the markets. And if we 
turn to the ’ proprietor of coal mines, we can scarcely 
conceive a person engaged in a more unpoetical occupa¬ 
tion, unless he were intending to outstrip our great epic 
poets, Homer, Virgil, and Dante, in a description of the 
Tartarean regions. He, again, who works in iron and 
the baser metals, and walks amongst his blazing forges, 
and ringing anvils, and brawny Vulcans, may be assumed 
to be a practical personage. The man who lives within 
sound of a Nasmyth’s hammer may be excused from in¬ 
dulging very much in flights of fancy. 

And yet this, on the whole, would be an inaccurate 
estimate of our money-making traders, in reference to 
their occupations and associations with art. Many of 
them are brought by their business into a closer con¬ 
nection with the fine arts than we might on first thoughts 
suppose. An aptitude for designing or judging upon 
design is essential in the trade of a calico-printer; and 
he cannot be a proficient in his business, unless he has 
a perception of correctness and beauty in drawing, and 
a fair taste in the application and harmony of colours. 
The merchant purchases these prints, and he has to 
exercise his discriminative faculty in the selection of the 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 5 


most eligible patterns. The machinist has his drawings 
and models; not indeed of the human face or the 
pleasant landscape, but of suspension and tubular 
bridges, engines, iron roofs, and steam ships; and out 
of his rough and shapeless materials he constructs his 
works of gigantic magnitude with as much precision 
and delicacy in the modelling as is required in a minia¬ 
ture statue. In like manner, the dyer and the bleacher 
have to handle their chemical preparations and their 
colours ; the pattern-card manufacturer has to study the 
principles of taste ; * the weaver of fancy patterns has to 
cultivate the faculty of design. Our men of business, 
therefore, are all more or less brought into a close 
connection with art, under one aspect or another; and 
though we cannot answer for all entertaining any love 
of it for its own sake, yet they must, we should 
imagine, be predisposed by their occupations for appre¬ 
ciating it in some degree when it is embodied and 
exhibited in its highest form. Indeed, it is no paradox 
to assert that a huge workshop like Manchester is in 
reality more likely to cradle a love of the beautiful in 
art, than the fairest scenes of rural seclusion, or even 
the quiet retreats of philosophic study. Nature, in her 
beauteous aspects, may evoke a spirit of admiration and 

* Manufactured goods are exported in very large packages ; 
and to prevent the necessity of opening these for sale at the 
end of the voyage, samples are pasted in a sort of scrap-book. 
The arrangement of these, in order to set them off to the best 
advantage, requires considerable taste. This is a trade in itself 
and is called ‘ Pattern-card designing.’ 


8 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


love in refined and sensitive feelings; our seats of 
learning may foster and mature the highest cultivation 
in some intellects; but, in a bustling city like Man¬ 
chester, the very million are, as it were, tossed upon the 
stream of life, and would be left to sink, unless their 
skill in some occupation were cultivated, and their 
inventive faculties industriously exercised.* 

We do not however put forward refinement of taste 
and manner as the leading characteristics of the Man¬ 
chester man. His distinctive quality is energy. Your 
genuine Manchester man knows not what it is to be 
beaten, even by bad times. If he has not openings for 
his trade, he makes them. He persuades the Queen of 
Timbuctoo in a friendly way that her men and maidens 
would look all the better for a covering of his calicoes. 
He will not be far behind Dr. Livingstone in his perilous 
explorations. No sooner does a coral island spring up, 
and get a few naked South Sea natives on it, than he 
establishes a trade there. If you are a physiognomist, 
you will agree with us. His countenance carries on 
it the mark of purpose and decision, for good or evil. 
You see nothing of that effeminate twinkling of the 
half-closed eye which augurs irresolution ; you discover 

[* Some of our Lancashire merchants and manufacturers have 
their galleries stored with very valuable paintings. They have 
mostly been judicious enough to select those of the modern 
school, about which there can be no mistake. Our late friend, 
Mr. Miller of Preston, who has recently been cut off in the 
prime of manhood, and in a career of distinguished usefulness, 
has left behind him a very costly and high-class collection.— 
1866.] 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 7 


nothing of that receding mouth which is somewhat 
indicative of high breeding, but betokens vacillation 
and want of will. We are far from meaning that many 
of our citizens are not characterized by sensibility and 
refinement; but as we consider the type of a stirring 
tradesman, we must fix upon energy and strength of 
will as his leading qualities. 

We have sometimes heard such a remark as this— 
If the biography of our Manchester merchants could 
be severally written, what strange incidents would be 
revealed, illustrative of the proverb that truth is 
stranger than fiction ! We do not ourselves believe in 
these romantic passages. The times of Whittington 
and his cat will never return. It is true that most of 
our wealthy citizens have risen in the world from a 
comparatively humble beginning ; it is undeniable too 
that some have owed their first spring in life to a lucky 
accident; but, as a rule, we have no faith in the 
romance. If each life could be traced, we should dis¬ 
cover the man simply toiling on with slow, steady, 
plodding progress. Commercial men, so far as we have 
been able to judge, do not get on in business from any 
special superiority of intellect, but from early economy,* 

* About sixty or seventy years ago, when the manufacturing 
trade was in its infancy, a canny Scot settled in Manchester, and 
by degrees laid the foundation of a large business. We were 
speaking a short time ago with a very old woman who knew 
him in his early struggles. His landlady thought he paid too 
little for his room, and was determined to raise his rent from 
Is. 6c?. to Is. 8 d. a week. This the Scotchman stoutly resisted, 
and was resolved to pack up his baggage and be gone, rather' 


8 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


undeviating application, and an aptitude to seize upon 
opportunities and occasions—in a word, from a well- 
regulated and well-applied energy. About seven years 
ago, a boy called upon us; he was the son of a small 
farmer in our native neighbourhood, and had come up 
fifty miles to Manchester, with his copy-book in his 
pocket as his only testimonial. We recommended him 
and his copy-book to a merchant with whom we were 
on terms of intimacy. He happened to have a boy’s 
place then vacant, and he engaged our young friend for 
a few shillings a week on trial. We occasionally see 
the youth now; he has become a dashing, energetic 
salesman, with a fierce look and determined whiskers; 
he is no doubt in receipt of a good salary at present, 
and has ‘ excelsior ’ notions floating through his brain 
for the future. Such, we apprehend, mutatis mutandis , 
is the history of many of our wealthy citizens. 

than pay a fraction more than eighteen-pence. After gaining 
his point, he concluded the dispute with this maxim, which 
ought to be remembered by our young men,—‘ It isn’t that I 
mind so muckle for the odd tuppence; but, ye ken, Betty, it’s 
the breaking into a fresh piece o’ siller !’ 

We met ourselves with a similar illustration of Manchester 
prudence in connection with our great Exhibition. * Why did 
you not take two-guinea tickets for yourself and family?’ we 
asked a gentleman of considerable property; ‘the guinea in¬ 
vestment, you know, does not admit you on the gay promenade 
days.’ ‘ Listen to me, young man,’ he said ; * don’t talk without 
thinking. It is not that I care for four two-guinea tickets; but’ 
—dropping his voice as though he wished to impress on me, as a 
secret, a new truth—‘ don’t you see, it would have involved a 
twenty-guinea dress a-piece for my wife and two daughters !’ 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857 . 9 

Energy of purpose has perhaps been the most con¬ 
spicuous characteristic of our citizens in getting up the 
Art Exhibitions of which Manchester has been the 
scene. The aid of artistic taste and decorative skill in 
carrying out your intentions is easily purchaseable, if 
you have money wherewith to purchase; but that 
determination which fixes on the attainment of an 
object, and pursues it undeterred by obstacles, is pecu¬ 
liarly Mancuniensian. We have notmuch acquaintance 
with our sister city at the mouth of the Mersey; but so 
far as we have seen, the races that populate Manchester 
and Liverpool are essentially different. Liverpool, it 
must be owned, produces a better-dressed class of men, 
and more showy equipages with more flaring crests. 
Liverpool dines regularly at six, dresses for dinner, 
drinks champagne, and rejoices in tall footmen with 
red plush breeches and dropsical calves. Liverpool 
flutters gaily as a butterfly at midsummer, but, by 
report, does not keep in mind as steadily as Manchester 
that a 1 winter of its discontent ’ may come. Liverpool 
would get up a gorgeous fancy-ball in that magnificent 
building called St. George’s Hall; Manchester, true to 
its solidity of purpose and will, grapples with the bolder 
project of an Exhibition of Art Treasures. 

The Exhibition of Art Treasures is not the only one 
in Manchester that deserves mention in the year 1857. 
That on the inauguration of the Mechanics’ Institute 
w&s in every sense successful, and deserved to be so. 
It was of a very miscellaneous character; it included 
machinery, specimens of furniture, Indian products and 


10 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857 . 


manufactures, paintings, photographs, statuary, armour, 
articles highly wrought in the precious metals, illustra¬ 
tions of the ceramic art, bronzes, iron castings, decorated 
textile fabrics, antique remains—indeed, every species 
of curiosity that the imagination can conceive. Besides 
the dealers in works of arts and vertu, many contributed 
to the Exhibition out of their private stores. To the 
Emperor of the French the directors of the Institute 
were greatly indebted. He sent some magnificent 
articles of French manufacture—specimens of Sevres 
porcelain, and of Gobelins and Beauvais tapestry—one 
of which, an enamelled painting on Sevres china, a 
copy of 1 Titian and his Mistress ’ in the Louvre, was 
of great value and exquisite beauty. Her Majesty’s 
Government permitted a large collection of firearms to 
be sent down from the Tower, illustrative of the history 
of our military weapons. The Directors of the East 
India Company contributed a miscellaneous assortment 
of native Indian goods—shawls of costly embroidery and 
golden needlework, as well as the coarse calico from 
the rudely-constructed loom. The Duke of Devon¬ 
shire lent his 1 gems,’ in which the Countess of Granville 
appeared at the coronation of the Emperor Alexander. 
The late Earl of Ellesmere added some valuable pictures 
to the stock of art-treasures. So that the great people 
of the earth came out of their stately reserve for a time, 
and fraternized, as became them, with the rough, hardy, 
grimy-faced, but high-spirited mechanics and> operatives 
of Manchester. 

We were present at the Mechanics’ Institute Exhi- 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857 . 11 


bition on the night of its close : the charge for admission 
was so low as to come within the means of working 
men ; and we were delighted to see so many with their 
wives and families taking a last look at so magnificent a 
spectacle before it passed away for ever. With all their 
faults, there is a large share of the better feelings of our 
nature in these sons of toil; and it is a pleasant thing to 
see them happy in any recreation which is at once pure 
and elevating, whether it be in watching from our parks 
the sun sinking to his golden rest, or in examining the 
less glorious exhibitions of human workmanship. Their 
lot is a hard one at the best, and it is, alas ! often made 
harder by their own imprudence; but if they are will¬ 
ing to lead a life of honesty, sobriety, and industry, 
they have many enjoyments within their reach. On 
this evening, we saw fathers and mothers with infants 
in their arms, and young children romping around them 
as though they knew no sorrow. We saw a pretty little 
girl of three years old pressing pertinaciously an orange 
upon Omphale in marble, who as obstinately refused it. 
There is something melancholy in the close of an exhi¬ 
bition ; it is the extinction of the beautiful, as a whole, 
though its elements may exist in their separate spheres 
and forms. But the time had appropriately arrived for 
the dissolution of this fair creation. Our grimy atmos¬ 
phere had done its work on many of the articles. The 
golden brocades and embroidered cloths had lost their 
freshness; the gilded furniture had become dim; naked 
1 Sea Nymphs’ might very properly have dipped them¬ 
selves again in their native element; 1 Crying Boys ’ in 


12 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857 . 


marble had dirty faces, as snivelling urchins generally 
have; ‘Peace’ was smiling through its soot; ‘War’ 
was dirty and befouled, as became it; and ‘ Godiva,’ 
‘ wife to that grim earl who ruled in Coventry,’ had no 
reason whatever to ‘ shower the rippled ringlets to her 
knee,’ and, ‘ like a creeping sunbeam,’slide from human 
gaze. 

But from another and more prevailing cause the time 
had arrived for closing this exhibition. When the sun 
arises, the lesser stars ‘ pale their ineffectual fires; ’ and 
the great Exposition of Art Treasures was now on the 
point of shining forth, and absorbing in its blaze the 
light of all smaller constellations. In the spring of 1856 
the thought scintillated through a Manchester brain, 
that as London, New York, Dublin, and Paris had suc¬ 
ceeded in getting up their respective exhibitions, there 
could be no great obstacle to the success of Manchester 
in a similar undertaking. A committee was formed, 
the usual preliminaries were gone through, and a guar¬ 
antee fund of 70,000/. was secured in a short time ; the 
work was undertaken with spirit; and so business-like 
were the calculations, and so energetic were the con¬ 
tractors in carrying them out, that on the week origi¬ 
nally intended for the opening, the whole arrangements 
were complete, and the Exhibition was inaugurated with 
unusual eclat. 

We will not venture into the province of the daily 
and weekly press by attempting a full description of the 
inauguration scene : it was unquestionably a magnificent 
spectacle, one that would bear a comparison with the 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857 . 13 


proudest pageant of the grandest capital in Europe. On 
the morning of the fifth of May, some three or four 
hundred thousand people lined the way to Old TrafFord, 
expecting the Prince Consort, while ten thousand were 
waiting for him within the building. And in truth it 
was a brilliant sight inside. Looking from the gallery, 
the eye rested upon a flower-bed of beauty—not still 
life, but ever-changing, like the figures of a kaleidoscope, 
into fresh forms of elegance and harmonies of colour. 
What diverse characters and costumes were there ! 
Ladies, slim, well-developed, and corpulent—juvenile, 
mediaeval, and antique—beautiful, passable, and, breathe 
it gently ! somewhat plain-looking—adorned with glit¬ 
tering jewels, and resplendent in every colour of the 
rainbow—peers and prelates arrayed according to their 
order—lord mayors, ordinary mayors, and lord provosts, 
in their golden chains of office—statesmen and diploma¬ 
tists in stars and ribbons, sheriffs in their robes—aider- 
men in red, councillors in blue, and clergymen in black 
—knights of the shire in their State costume—celebrities 
in Court dresses—general officers in scarlet and gold, 
decorated with medals and orders, mighty men of 
valour in their pinched hats and well-filled coats and 
trousers—and lo ! towering above the surrounding 
heads, and moving through the crowd in an atmosphere 
of mystery, the awe-inspiring Wizard of the North, in 
full Highland costume. Listen ! cannons are booming 
and drums beating; every eye is turned to the door; 
the Prince enters with his suite; and at the very 
moment the sun, which during the morning had been 


U MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


obscured, shone forth, illuminating the whole building 
as if with his benediction, and lending a still lovelier 
aspect to the scene by that golden brilliancy which art 
cannot attain or power command. The Prince seemed 
to enjoy the spectacle with the feeling of the artist and 
the fancy of the poet, as he walked down the nave 
between rows of statues shining in their nakedness, 
knights on horseback in glittering armour, and living 
dames and damsels for whose smiles those knights might 
have sprung forward to break a lance ; while the crea¬ 
tions of art, colder but no less beautiful than the blood- 
warm forms beneath, looked down upon the pageant as 
though about to start from the canvas that had held them 
like enchanted princesses for a hundred years. The 
royal party reached the transept, when suddenly the 
liquid notes of Clara Novello, in the first verse of God 
save the Queen , float to the extreme end of the building 
in all but celestial richness, chasteness, and purity. 
Then follow those long addresses, wearisome, but neces¬ 
sary, in unmelodious voices—those bowings and jerkings 
and ungraceful motions, which are the offspring of eti¬ 
quette. ‘ The words of Mercury are harsh after the 
songs of Apollo.’ The inauguration prayer is now 
offered up by the Bishop of Manchester ; a procession is 
formed to beat the boundaries; the Exhibition is for¬ 
mally declared to be open; and with the ‘ Hallelujah 
Chorus,’ very creditably performed by a body of six 
hundred Lancashire singers, under the direction of Mr. 
C. Halle—in which his Royal Highness himself joined 
with heart and voice—closed a spectacle such as Man- 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 15 


Chester had never before witnessed, and of which its pro¬ 
moters may well be proud, as having passed before the 
eye in its gorgeous array without even a passing shadow 
to mar its beauty or to detract from its success. 

In one particular this Exhibition is unique: it ex¬ 
cludes the wares of tradesmen, and is limited to the 
exposition of those art treasures which are ordinarily 
locked up in private collections, and rarely come under 
the gaze of the profanum vulgus. This circumscribed 
its variety, and added much to the expense of its pre¬ 
paration ; but it rendered it more recherche in its char¬ 
acter, and more enjoyable to the eye of taste. All 
honour to her Majesty and the Prince Consort for the 
readiness with which they listened to the project, and 
the hearty manner in which they promised to advance 
it by their contributions. This gave the key-note to 
the country. Many were doubting how far it would 
be prudent to entrust their ancestral treasures into the 
keeping of Manchester; some perhaps were reflecting 
whether they owed any great debt of gratitude to the 
metropolis of cotton. 4 What has Manchester to do with 
art ? ’ a noble duke is said to have asked, when his 
co-operation was requested ; ‘ let it stick to its cotton¬ 
spinning.’ But to the credit of a vast majority of our 
aristocracy be it spoken, they soon entered into the un¬ 
dertaking in a generous English spirit, and gracefully 
contributed the best specimens of their matchless stores. 
With the titled proprietors of such choice collections 
who refused to part with them even for a short season, 
we have no sympathy. . Let them console themselves 


16 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


with the sentiment which Horace puts into the mouth 
ofone equally churlish in his conservatism :— 

Populus me sibilat; at mihi plaudo 
Ipse domi, simul ac nummos contemplor in ared.* 

Before turning to the pictures, which are unques¬ 
tionably the main feature of the Exhibition, we cannot 
glance around the interior of the building without 
perceiving at once how many a museum of art and 
domestic plate-room have been invaded for the collec¬ 
tion of so vast an aggregate of objects. Her Majesty 
and the Prince Consort contributed, heartily and 
liberally, not only valuable paintings, but cabinets of 
wondrous workmanship, golden salvers of enormous 
size and curious moulding, embossed tables of silver, 
tripods of the same character, shields of great magnitude 
and elaborate carving, rare specimens of Oriental products 
and manufactures, goblets, dishes, china vases, nautilus 
cups, enamels, caskets, time-pieces—the choicest speci¬ 
mens from those store-houses which have received their 
treasures through a long line of monarchs, and are yet 
gathering fresh additions ; many of our nobility, of the 
highest rank and most ancient lineage, followed their 
example, selecting from their ancestral possessions spe¬ 
cimens of art which are either conspicuous for their 
workmanship or intrinsic value, or which gather round 
them the interest of historic associations—enormous 
groups of figures wrought in the precious metals, colossal 
epergnes, gigantic vases, immense vessels of silver and 


* Sat. I. i. 67. 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 17 


gold, which might be cradles, or baby-baths, or wine- 
coolers, but which seem to have been designed for no 
specific object but to exhibit the beauties of art and the 
wealth of the owner; the several departments of our 
Government united in affording the particular articles 
under their control that were likely to be illustrative of 
any period in history, or of invention at any specific 
time; that powerful Company which rules our East 
Indian territories, on this occasion also, sent its finest 
specimens of Oriental curiosities, — bowls, daggers, 
deadly weapons, embroideries in silk and gold, carvings 
in ivory, silver filagree caskets and rose-water sprinklers, 
musical instruments, furniture in carved wood, trappings 
for elephants and horses of rich velvet inwoven with 
gold, idols which the Hindoo had worshipped, swords 
which rajahs had wielded without mercy, and an 
Indian tent that would invite repose beneath an Asiatic 
sun ; Stonyhurst College selected from its stores pyxes 
and plaques of gold, ancient rings of inconvenient size 
and shape, diptychs in ivory, the 1 St. George ’ in gold 
worn by Sir Thomas More, statuettes of St. Ambrose 
and Thomas a Becket, crucifixes in silver that even 
Protestant might worship, and sacerdotal vestments in- 
wrought with gold and glittering with jewelled crosses, 
the gifts of ancient monarchs; our own Universities 
sent massive plate that had lain for years undis¬ 
turbed, and the golden croziers that had been wielded 
by. the hands of confessors 'who counted not their lives 
dear for their faith; New College committed to our 
keeping the pastoral staff of William of Wykeham, of 
VOL. II. c 


18 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


whose princely munificence so many monuments remain 
— KTii/jiara eg aei —that he yet speaketh after a sleep of 
five centuries ; Corpus Christi contributed some antique 
plate, several apostle-spoons, and the golden crozier of 
Bishop Fox, its founder, the patron of Wolsey and the 
promoter of learning ; St. John’s, Cambridge, furnished 
an enormous loving-cup, from which many a burly 
ecclesiastic had drawn a hearty draught of rich wine 
delicately spiced; other colleges sent their antique 
goblets and vessels of gold, which in the good old days 
of generous diet had been filled many a time and oft 
with the choicest sack, and been balanced in the jewelled 
fingers of some well-fed cleric ; municipal corporations 
—and most conspicuously those of Norwich and Lin¬ 
coln—added to the general stock of varieties, their 
State swords and maces, and the golden collars and 
badges of their order—-specimens of curious workman¬ 
ship, and of great intrinsic value—the ancient bequests 
of loyal subjects and the donations of princes and rulers; 
the Guild Companies of the metropolis, the Ashmolean 
Museum, the Foundling Hospital, the Archaeological 
Institute, the British Museum, and the various learned 
Societies, cast in their specimens of art out of their 
carefully chosen collections; Cathedral chapters dis¬ 
closed golden relics of the ancient time, which carry us 
back to the days of the Church's temporal splendour, 
ere sacrilegious hands had profaned and ransacked her 
treasures; descendants of ancient knights sent the 
armour in which their ancestors had gaily broken a 
lance in the tournament, or fought desperately on the 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 19 


field of carnage; lineal inheritors of ancient titles lent for 
our inspection the rude instruments of the hardy barons 
their forefathers—hunting horns that had awakened 
the slumbering echoes in our primaeval forests when 
Robin Hood and his merry men took their pastime 
there, and trumpets that had roused the drowsy warder 
on the castle wall; collectors of curiosities brought out 
of their treasures things new and old — coins and 
medals, cameos and china, porcelain vases, opal vessels 
and bronzes, shields of the ancient Britons and relics of 
the Anglo-Saxons, helmets, gauntlets, cross-bows, par- 
tizans, and halberts, that had done good service four 
centuries ago, vases that had been the prizes of some 
Isthmian contest, pilgrims’ staves that had probably 
pressed the sands of Palestine, the State cap of one of the 
Venetian Doges, barbaric ornaments and weapons of 
warfare, the purse of silver embroidery and the veritable 
crimson hat of that proud old Cardinal who was at once 
the type and the tomb of ecclesiastical grandeur, the 
dagger with which Felton despatched the Duke of 
Buckingham, the shirt and watch of Charles I., the 
very snuff-box that fell from the trembling hand of the 
second Charles, and was found under the oak tree, and 
the pipe from which Tippoo Saib puffed his smoke, 
indifferent to the cries of his victims; a body of Man¬ 
chester merchants purchased for the Exhibition the 
Soulages Collection, with its quaint specimens of 
medieval furniture, from rare cabinets, to a pair of 
bellows;—all, the Queen, the Prince Consort, the peer, 
the man of science, the antiquarian, the ecclesiastic, the 


20 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


gentleman of ancient descent, and the plain English 
merchant, the novus homo of yesterday—all vied in 
adding a gem to the glittering coronet of art that was 
to encircle for a time the rugged brow of trade. 

But around this bare fact a host of agreeable associa¬ 
tions congregate. We cannot but feel pleasure at the 
reflection that the undertaking has elicited so much 
sympathy of spirit from the noble, the wealthy, and the 
refined in our land, with those who have fewer privi¬ 
leges and possessions than themselves; nor can we 
doubt that this kindly feeling will be reciprocated from 
those to whom the boon, temporary though it be, has 
been so generously accorded. The Exhibition has 
called forth, in the words of the Prince Consort, ‘ a 
generous feeling of mutual confidence and good-will 
between the different classes of society.’ * Half a cen¬ 
tury ago a duke would as soon have thought of exhibit¬ 
ing his duchess in public as one of his old masters, and 
least of all would he have committed his treasure to 
Manchester with its riotous mobs and sooty chimneys. 
But Manchester is now sober and sane, and we feel 
assured that its tone of feeling will not deteriorate, when 
it remembers that its hereditary foes have stretched out 
to it the right hand of fellowship. The great social evil 
of our day is to be found in class distinctions and class 
prejudices. Society, we know, must necessarily have 
its many gradations; but when the divisions are too 
broad, there will spring up, as a matter of course, a tone 


* Address to the Executive Committee. 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 21 


of superciliousness on one side and a feeling of retali¬ 
ation on the other. Our landed aristocracy perhaps 
cannot be charged with unkindness, as a rule, towards 
those who have come under their influence : still, at 
the best, they have entrenched themselves within a deep 
and wide moat of feudalism, which precludes them from 
understanding the feelings and habits of those socially 
beneath them. In their readiness, however, to entrust 
their treasures of art to Manchester for the improve¬ 
ment and enjoyment of the community, we see, not 
an emblem of feudalism, but a token of advancing civi¬ 
lization ; we perceive a willing effort, not to assist a 
helpless dependant, but to aid the active, vigorous, self- 
dependent mind in the progress of refinement. And 
as this Exhibition brings the nobility and country 
gentlemen of the land to our city, we do not doubt that 
many of their preconceptions will be disabused, and 
that they will carry away the impression that, either 
physically, socially, or politically, Manchester is not 
quite so black as it is represented. 

But the division of classes is still more perceptible 
among our large manufacturing populations. Capital 
is ranged on one mountain side and labour on the other; 
and too often they are set in battle array. Such must 
ever be the antagonism, more or less, where machinery 
has exalted one man to be the master of some thousands 
of work-people. But it is the duty of the Christian and 
th‘e gentleman to remove, as far as it is possible, these 
grounds of mutual jealousy and distrust. And among 
the many agencies which might be employed for this 


22 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


purpose, we cannot believe but that the gathering 
together of rich and poor, of masters and work-people, 
on one level, for one object, and that of refined enjoy¬ 
ment, must tend to soften asperities, and infuse a kind¬ 
lier feeling between classes which in themselves have 
little but human affections in common. 

But the great attraction of the Exhibition consists in 
its paintings; and assuredly they form an unrivalled 
collection. The difficulty that first presents itself to 
the visitor is that arising from the embarrassment of 
numbers. The eye and the mind are bewildered with 
the multiplicity of objects ; and it is not till the specta¬ 
tor has recalled and concentrated his wandering facul¬ 
ties, that he can enter into a systematic inspection of 
the various pictorial departments. The chronological 
arrangement of the pictures, however—arising out of a 
judicious suggestion of the Prince Consort—at once 
gives an educational character to the Exhibition, faci¬ 
litates a systematic view of its miscellaneous contents, 
and aids the memory in retaining the similitude of the 
most striking objects that are presented to the eye. 

If we investigate the philosophic cause of the pleasure 
which we derive from pictures and works of art, we 
shall find it in that intuitive propensity to imitation, 
and in that fondness for objects of imitation, which are 
more or less common to all. Man, says Aristotle, is of 
all creatures the most imitative—jui^rt/cwraroi' kon* 
This innate principle developes itself in the savage; 


* Poetics, chap. iv. 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 23 


and associated with it, there is a natural fondness for 
clever representations. There is a pleasure in contem¬ 
plating them abstract from the nature of the subject. It 
is agreeable to look upon figures of art even in them¬ 
selves revolting. This springs from that process of 
comparison which is passing unconsciously through 
the mind, and which, as being a species of advance 
in knowledge, is in itself pleasurable— ort crv/xfiaivei 
Oeojpovt'rag fxavdaveiv Kai <TvWoyi£ecr6ai f tl ekclgtov* 
But still more attractive are those representations which 
are at once true to nature and lovely in themselves. 
The beautiful becomes more so by reason of the accu¬ 
racy of its imitation. And now another instinct de- 
velopes itself: whatever we love, or admire, or reverence, 
we desire to perpetuate, in memory at least; and of all 
the arts, that of painting is the one by which a main 
idea, with its many associations, may be most definitely 
stereotyped. Hence works of art are encouraged and 
preserved with care; the objects that give pleasure are 
increased from generation to generation ; and hence ac¬ 
cumulated that wonderful collection of pictures which 
is gathered into our Exhibition—a collection illustrating 
human life and passion in its every phase, the ideal 
and the real, the fabulous and the true—arraying before 
our eyes in their effigies the historical characters of 
bygone ages and distant lands—displaying the animal 
form in its every type, in its usefulness, its serenity and 
its savage grandeur—exhibiting nature in its every 

* Poetics, chap. iv.; also Rhetoric , b. i, c. xi. 


24 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


aspect, in sunshine and in storm, in its peaceful valleys 
and rugged mountains, in the gliding river and the 
rolling ocean—comprising specimens of every date and 
style and nation, from the infancy of painting even to 
those of the artist who is now engaged in fixing upon 
canvas the evanescent figures around him for the 
enduring admiration of ages to come. 

In considering the pictorial art as an educational 
agency, we must keep in view the moral influence it 
may be made to exert. This subject seems to be handled 
after a somewhat latitudinarian fashion. If a painting 
be beautiful in execution, no matter what it represents, 
it is considered an object proper for exhibition, and 
conducive to refinement. We are no prudes; but we 
emphatically protest against this abandonment of de¬ 
cency. As well might you reason that Handel’s music 
would be elevating when linked to obscene words. 
That the faculty of the painter may exert an ennobling 
influence, we thankfully acknowledge : even the early 
Byzantine specimens of the pictorial art, exhibiting it in 
its rudimentary form, leave us better men, from the 
devotional spirit they suggest. Then, who can suffi¬ 
ciently appreciate those sublime productions of the 
great masters, as Raphael, Murillo, Guido, Annibale 
Caracci, in which the leading events of redemption, 
from the miraculous conception of the Virgin to the 
last suffering of the Saviour, are set forth in such 
accuracy of composition, richness of colour, and delicacy 
of expression ? Nor are we to limit a moral influence 
to subjects strictly religious ; the painter who repre- 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 25 


sents a virtuous and ennobling deed of any kind, is a 
benefactor of his species. * The Departure of Regulus,’ 
and 1 The Death of Wolfe,’ by West, are not great 
pictures, but they convey a lofty sentiment. Nay, we 
may gather good thoughts and kindly feelings from 
much less ambitious subjects than these. Is there not 
a lesson in the child praying on its mother’s knee, in 
the hearty, rollicking face of the schoolboy, in the happy 
country scene, in the way-side flowers, in the running 
brook, in the golden sunset, in the cottager’s home, in 
the old churchyard ? There is not a sunny spot or a 
dark shadow on the face of nature which is not calcu¬ 
lated to improve the heart, if the eye that looks on it be 
pure and single. 

But, on the other hand, painting may be made the 
vehicle of evil thoughts and gross passions. Now it is 
not the rough and uncourtly sketch, nor the naked 
figure simply, that we condemn, but those forms and 
groups which the artist has arranged as though for the 
purpose of exciting indelicate ideas and prurient fancies. 
In our reading, also, it is not the rough jest, or the 
comical description, that can injure; neither is it the 
delicate subject delicately handled, such as we may find 
in the Paradise Lost or the Seasons. But it is those vile 
portraitures of love, or more properly lust, with which 
our low novels abound, that exert such pernicious 
influence, especially on the female portion of society. 
Gross, nay filth}'', as are the plays of Aristophanes in 
many parts, they are comparatively innocuous by the 
side of many descriptions in the later writings of Byron 


26 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


and many love passages in the poetry of Moore. To 
illustrate our meaning from some pictures in our Exhi¬ 
bition. The ‘ Susanna and Elders,’ by Bonifazio Vene- 
ziano ; the‘Nine Muses,’by Tintoretto; ‘Le Respect,’ 
by Paolo Veronese, are delicate subjects, yet handled 
with much refinement,—so much so that they excite no 
grossness of sentiment to mar the enjoyment you derive 
from them as mere paintings. On the other hand, such 
compositions as the ‘ Venus and Cupid’ of Pontormo, 
the ‘ Leda’ of Tintoretto, the ‘ Rape of Europa ’ by 
Titian, the ‘ David and Bathsheba ’ of Guercino, the 
‘ Venus and Mars ’ of Luca Giordano, and the ‘ Jupiter 
and Antiope ’ of Nicholas Poussin, are suggestive of what 
is coarse, gross, and lascivious, and only the more mis¬ 
chievous from the truthfulness of their execution. We 
cannot estimate highly the soul-purity of a man who 
would exercise his surpassing mastery over art in por¬ 
traying some fabulous heathen deity in an act of heathen 
sensuality. It seems a mocking and gratuitous insult 
to all that is delicate and pure in our nature. And if 
we consider those ancient masters inexcusable, the 
nature of whose subjects was in a great measure re¬ 
gulated by the fashion of the time, still more do we 
condemn our modern artists who follow their example, 
with little of their power, and none of their excuse. Of 
this class, Etty may be instanced as a type. We applaud 
Her Majesty, the mother of a young family, for rejecting 
his picture from her collection, on an occasion which will 
be remembered. He may have been a great colourist, 
though he does not evince this excellence as an inva- 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 27 


riable rule ; but he is very often gross, and gratuitously 
so in his conception of a subject. We are told that he 
was by no means a man of sensual temperament; but 
had we not been so informed, we should have drawn a 
different inference from his paintings. What are we to 
understand by his 1 Idle Lake ? ’ It is absurd as a 
drawing, and seems to have been conceived only to 
exhibit the female figure in a lascivious posture. The 
‘ Sleeping Nymph and Satyrs ’ is a rival of the worst 
ancient pictures in the suggestiveness of grossness. In 
his 1 Cleopatra,’ why again represent the attendants of 
that queen as nudes, and introduce naked Cupids 
hovering round ? We never look on his 1 Sirens ’ 
without a loathing. What is ‘ The Storm ’ but a repre¬ 
sentation of figures, naked without any reason, in a 
cockle-shell, tossed by a sea in which a large vessel 
would scarcely live ? Even his conception of £ The 
Last Judgment ’ could not be formed without the figure, 
in the foreground, of a naked woman in a gross posture. 

We can have no sympathy whatever with any artist 
who does not cherish the idea, in his imaginative works, 
that he has a moral mission as well as an artistic one to 
fulfil, and that he stands on the same ground, in that 
particular, as the writer of poetry or fiction. He may 
be the missionary associate of Sir Walter Scott and 
Wordsworth, or of the authors of Ernest Maltravers 
and Don Juan. 

In this collection the ancient and modern schools .of 
painting are fairly pitted against each other. To the 
popular taste the modern pictures have been the more 


28 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


attractive, if we may judge from the comparative number 
of visitors in each division. This may arise in some 
degree from the fact that our modern paintings are more 
accordant with what falls under our daily observation, 
and more congenial with our nineteenth-century notions. 
Still, examining the specimens of each period, not with 
the eye of a critic, which often sees things invisible, 
but with the ordinary judgment and taste of one who 
admires the fine arts, we are much inclined ourselves to 
reduce considerably that broad distinction between the 
schools which has been so generally supposed to exist. 
In the highest style of art—that illustrative of scriptural 
and devotional subjects—it is true, no comparison can 
be instituted; for while some of the ancient masters 
have attained in it as near to perfection as we can 
imagine, it is one into which our modern painters have 
entered with but partial success. Here Murillo stands 
out conspicuously in our Exhibition for the number and 
beauty of his works. Many an one who has but little 
feeling for the fine arts has gazed with wonder and ad¬ 
miration on 1 The Adoration of the Shepherds,’ ‘ The 
Annunciation,’ ‘ Joseph and his Brethren,’ ‘ The Holy 
Family,’ ‘ The Baptism of Christ,’ ‘ Abraham Entertain¬ 
ing the Angels,’ ‘ The Virgin and Child,’ the ‘ Ecce 
Homo,’ as well as other rare compositions that have 
sprung from his master touch. Of this class too there are 
other marvellous specimens, such as ‘ The Holy Family 
resting,’ by Fra Bartolomeo; 1 Christ Bearing his Cross,’ 
by Raphael; ‘ The Adoration of the Kings,’ by Ma¬ 
buse ; ‘ The Unmerciful Servant,’ ‘ Daniel before Nebu- 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 29 


chadnezzar,’ and ‘ Belshazzar’s Feast,’ by Rembrandt; 

‘ The Tribute Money,’ by Rubens ; ‘ The Holy Family,’ 
by Andrea del Sarto; ‘The Baptism,’ by Battista Franco; 

‘ The Assumption,’ by Guido ; ‘ The Three Maries,’ by 
Annibale Caracci ; ‘ Hagar in the Desert,’ by Francesco 
Mola; ‘ The Presentation of Queen Esther,’ by Tintoretto 
—all of which are in the highest style of art, in conception 
and execution, as well as in dignity of subject. Against 
these masterpieces it would not be prudent to place the 
devotional compositions of our modern artists, such as 
‘Christ Blessing Little Children,’ by West; ‘The Tribute 
Money,’ by Copley ; Hay don’s ‘Judgment of Solomon; ’ 
Rigaud’s ‘ Samson and Delilah; ’ Martin’s ‘ Fall of 
Babylon; ’ ‘ John Preaching in the Wilderness,’ by Etty; 

‘ Christ Weeping over Jerusalem,’ by Eastlake ; ‘ Christ 
Teaching Humility,’ by Ary Scheffer : Herbert’s ‘ Boy 
Daniel; ’ ‘Moses consigned to the Nile,’ by Eddis; ‘The 
Opening of the Sixth Seal,’ by Danby ; though some of 
these are high efforts, worthily sustained. 

In that department of the art which is not devotional, 
but represents life in its more heroic and imaginative 
forms, the works of Rubens stand out from the rest in 
the collection. His ‘ Prometheus,’ ‘ St. Martin,’ ‘ Queen 
Tomyris,’ ‘ Argus,’ ‘ Diana,’ seem to combine every 
element for the composition of a rich, living, glowing 
picture. ‘The Misers’ of Quentin Matsys and the 
‘ Cleopatra’ of Guido are also remarkable examples of 
this class. Our modern artists supply many specimens 
under this category, various in their degrees of merit. 
The. efforts of West, Haydon, Barry, Fuseli are some- 


SO MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


what ambitious, but certainly not effective. Hilton’s 
‘ Ganymede’ evinces some power of conception and 
colour, but the subject is an absurd one. We prefer 
Opie’s rough handling in his ‘ Age and Infancy ’ and 
< The Schoolmistress,’ to Northcote’s sentimental touches 
in ‘ La Fayette,’ and * Jael and Sisera.’ The ‘ Joan of 
Arc ’ and * The Combat,’ by Etty, are disagreeable ex¬ 
hibitions, unredeemed by any excellence of colouring. 
Wilkie’s‘ Columbus,’ and * Napoleon and Pope Pius VII.’ 
are what might be expected from an unimaginative 
Scotchman. ‘ Melancthon’s First Misgivings,’ by Lance; 
Poole’s ‘Troubadours;’ Goodhall’s ‘ Cranmer; ’ Herbert’s 
‘ Brides of Venice; ’ Allan’s ‘ Assassination of the Re¬ 
gent Murray;’ Frith’s ‘ Trial of a Witch;’ Leighton’s 
‘ Procession of Cimabue; ’ ‘ Colonel Blood Stealing the 
Crown Jewels,’ by Briggs; ‘ The Queen of Hungary 
Distributing Alms,’ by De Keyser; ‘The Emigrant’s 
Farewell,’ by Tidemann; ‘ The Franciscans at Service,’ 
by Granet, — are generally admired as works of high 
art. Maclise’s ‘ Macbeth ’ is a favourite, but to us it 
seems to push the heroic into Bedlam. Ward’s ‘ Louis 
XVI.’ and ‘ Charlotte Corday ’ are, in our estimation, 
unrivalled for expression of feeling and effect of colour. 
The most popular picture in the whole Exhibition is 
Wallis’s ‘ Death of Chatterton,’ though we conceive that 
its striking effects produced by light and shade are as 
much the elaboration of trick as of genuine art; nor can 
we pass on without paying our humble tribute of admira¬ 
tion to Hunt’s ‘ Claudio and Isabella,’ where the figures 
seem to stand off the flat surface as though they were 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 31 


modelled. Could it be the same hand that drew ‘ The 
Awakened Conscience ? ’ 

In portrait-painting, the two corridors are fairly- 
matched. The portraits by Reynolds exhibited here 
have for the most part faded. His own likeness and 
that of Sir William Chambers are still fresh, and show 
what truthfulness of expression and richness of flesh- 
colour were at his command. What a loveable picture 
must that of the Viscountess Althorp have been when 
fresh from the easel; even now the spectator is riveted 
by the sweet expression of those eyes. Then poor Nelly 
O’Brien ! Gainsborough is represented in the Exhi¬ 
bition more favourably than Sir Joshua. His ‘ Mrs. 
Graham ’ and the ‘ Lady,’ in the Marquis of Hertford’s 
collection, both in the same style, are marvellous in 
their delicacy of finish. His ‘ Blue Boy ’ is a solid, 
flesh-and-blood portrait, but it does not, in our opinion, 
disprove the principle that blue, when predomi¬ 
nating, is an inharmonious colour. Then look at 
the portraits of Garrick and his wife ! What expres¬ 
sion is there in the face of Garrick especially! You 
momentarily expect that some funny question will be 
put to you from the canvas. We have also rare 
specimens from the hands of Hogarth, Romney, Beechey, 
Ramsay, Lawrence, Phillips, Raeburn, Gordon, Pickers- 
gill, Winterhalter, and Grant. But turning to the other 
side of the Exhibition, we find that this was a depart¬ 
ment of painting which the ancient masters had not 
neglected. Look at the glowing flesh-colour of Titian’s 
e Ariosto.’ Is not the likeness of Murillo, by himself, 


32 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


inimitably rich in colour and truthful in expression ? 
The heads, too, by Eubens, Eembrandt, Andrea del 
Sarto, Tintoretto, Ferdinand Bol, and Velazquez, are 
fine specimens of the art. We are thankful for the 
portraits Holbein has left behind him ; but, however 
truthful, they are stiff and ungraceful. The ‘Vandykes ’ 
in the Exhibition have for the most part faded; though 
a few which are still fresh in colour give full proof of 
the artist’s power. The same may be said of Lely’s 
portraits ; whatever Charles’s favourites were in flesh and 
blood, they are no great beauties as they have come down 
to us on Sir Peter’s canvas. The heads by Kneller are 
singularly interesting in their associations, being the 
representations of our most celebrated literary charac¬ 
ters ; but we do not perceive that, artistically, they are 
distinguished by any peculiar excellence. 

In landscape-painting our modern artists, so far as we 
can judge, are fairly on an equality with the ancient 
masters. There are several attractive landscapes by 
Claude in our Exhibition, though on the whole he is 
not favourably represented here : there is the famous 
‘ Eainbow Landscape,’ by Eubens, in the Hertford 
collection; we have an effective specimen of Eembrandt’s 
power in this department of painting; we have country 
scenes by Hobbema, Nicholas Poussin, Salvator Eosa, 
Euysdael, Cuyp, Teniers, and others. Still, after 
inspecting these with pleasure, we could turn with 
equal satisfaction to the works of our own artists. We 
could admire none the less the glowing sunny scenes of 
Wilson, or the cool woods and humble cottages of Gains- 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857 . 33 


borough. We could gaze with a sensation of coolness, 
even in the dog-days, on the green, grassy, watery 
landscapes of Constable; we could revel in the ‘ Turners,’ 
almost infinite in their variety of light, shade, colour, 
and atmospheric effect, till we ever saw in them fresh 
beauties, and almost believed in Ruskin. Muller, Callcot, 
Stanfield, Creswick, Danby, Linton, Anthony, Linnell— 
why mention these ? 

As we descend in the scale of subjects we begin to 
get the mastery over those giants of old. In what is 
called the genre or unheroic class of paintings, our 
modern artists have only rivals in the Dutch school. 
In our Exhibition there are ancient pictures of this 
category that will well repay a minute inspection, such 
as those by Jan Steen, David Teniers, Michael Van 
Musscher, Pieter de Hooge, Nicholas Berchem, the 
Ostades, Nicholas Maas, William and Franz Van Mieres, 
and Gerard Dow. Still, we prefer our English speci¬ 
mens as being more generic in their conception and 
equally accurate in delineation,—as being more ideal 
and not less true to nature. Hogarth and Wilkie are 
household names and affections among us. Then what 
think you of Webster ? For our own part we love him 
best of all, with his genial fondness for the frolics of 
boyhood. Look at 1 The Playground,’ and be at school 
again for five minutes with those companions you re¬ 
member, many of whom are either dead or scattered far 
and* wide. And oh ! that incomparable 1 Slide ! ’ Every 
figure is a study to admire and to laugh at. Of this 
picture’s truthfulness to nature we heard an amusing 

VOL. II, L 


34 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857 . 


illustration. An old farmer and his wife, standing near 
us, were gazing on it very intently, till at length the 
fire kindled in the man’s mind, and he said to his dame 
with a hearty laugh, 1 Egoy, Molly, but they’ll o’ be 
deawn ! ’ 1 Ay, for sure will they, William,’ was the re¬ 

sponse ,— 1 they connot help it.’ Would you wish to see 
a more sagacious group than those engaged in ‘ The 
Rubber ? ’ What unfathomable thoughts are working in 
their brains ? Look, again, at O’Neill’s ‘ Obstinate Jury¬ 
man.’ Is not the central figure the very personation of 
doggedness in his rough overcoat, his thick muffler, and 
strong leggins ? ‘ The School/ by Faed, is a pleasant 

picture. Richter’s ‘ Tight Shoe ’ is familiar to most 
from the engraving of it. We prefer Maclise’s 1 Snap- 
Apple Night’ to his somewhat purposeless scenes from 
Shakspeare. But where shall we stop if we examine in 
detail the endless varieties of this school ? Most of our 
artists have at some time or other tried their hands on 
subjects of this nature. We need only mention the 
names of Mulready, Philip, Cope, Frith, Leslie, Goodall, 
Liversege, Rippingille, Horsley, and Collins. 

If we descend to animal-painting, we are far ahead 
of the ancient masters. Rubens and Snyders have left 
behind some spirited representations of a ‘ Boar Hunt’ 
and of ‘ Dead Game : ’ there are in the Exhibition also 
some life-like ‘ Ducks and Fowls ’ by Ilondekoeter, and 
some very natural cows and bulls and horses by Paul 
Potter and Albert Cuyp. Still these are inferior to the 
best specimens of our modern animal painters. In the 
domestic animals of Gainsborough we see the same 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 35 


artistic power as in his human figures. Then what 
majestic bulls are those by Ward ! What living flocks 
of sheep and herds of cattle are those by Sidney Cooper, 
as they are bivouacking with their drovers on the wild 
moor ! Ansdell, too, is a right honest portrayer of 
animal life in all its varieties. There are several good 
pictures of cattle by the Bonheurs in the Exhibition. 
But who, ancient or modern, can vie with Edwin 
Landseer ? * Is thy servant a dog ? * was Sydney 

Smith’s appropriate response, when he was asked to sit 
to Landseer for his portrait ,— 1 is thy servant a dog that 
he should do this thing ? ’ 1 The Dogs of St. Bernard,’ 

‘ The Stag at Bay,’ and ‘ There is Life in the Old Dog 
yet,’* are in the Exhibition. But we prefer Landseer’s 
touch in his smooth-coated animals. Who ever saw 
anything like that ‘ Alexander and Diogenes ? ’ How 
you long to pat the fat back of the Imperial Alexander, 
as he erects his head, fixes his eye, and shows one tooth 
in regal dignity, as becomes a monarch at the head of 
his train, while you would hesitate a moment before 
you placed your hand within reach of the Cynic in his 

* It happened that Landseer’s picture, ‘ There’s Life in the 
Old Dog yet,’ was hung at no great distance from ‘ The Death 
of Lear,’ by Cope. A countryman and his wife on one occasion 
were standing before the latter, and seemed to be impressed 
with the dying scene. ‘What is it?’ asked the man. ‘Why,’ 
said his lady, fumbling at the catalogue, getting confused in 
the figures, and at last almost spelling out the title,—‘ There’s 
life in the old dog yet.’ ‘That’ll do,’ rejoined her husband,— 
‘ that’s capital! There’s life in the old dog yet,—but it’ll soon 
be out on him.’ 


36 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


tub! And where shall we find a match for ‘ The 
Shoeing ? ’ What reality is there in that horse, as he 
stands with his leg on the blacksmith’s knee, his curved 
neck so beautifully shaded, his ear turning backward at 
the clink of the hammer, and taking it altogether with 
much composure, as though it were not his first shoeing. 
The hound lazily recumbent in the foreground takes 
the proceeding as a matter of course. The donkey’s 
head too is beautifully painted, even to the red ribbon 
which the Squire’s son or daughter has fastened on the 
bridle. And yet we fear that in this unrivalled picture 
there is something not quite true to nature. Medio de 
fonte leporum surgit amari aliquid. Hear the late Lord 
Sefton’s critique on it. His lordship was not remark¬ 
able as a connoisseur, but he had seen many a horse 
shod; like the sultan mentioned by Burke,* who 
detected an error in a picture of a decollated head of 
John the Baptist, Lord Sefton observed at once a mis¬ 
take in the grouping. ‘ A beautiful painting ! ’ said his 
lordship; ‘ but you never in your life saw a blacksmith 
turn away the horse’s foot from the light ! ’ 

The corridor appropriated to the paintings in water¬ 
colours has proved to be one of the favourite lounges in 
the Exhibition; nor can this be a matter of surprise, 
seeing that it contains nearly a thousand of the very 
best productions of our best artists. There is an es¬ 
pecial pleasure in the inspection of a good ‘water¬ 
colour : ’ the picture is agreeable in itself, and you are 


Essay On Taste. 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 37 


free from the apprehension that, instead of an old 
master, you are examining only a sorry counterfeit. 
The Portland and Buccleuch collections of miniatures 
are well worth a careful study, both from their artistic 
excellence and their historic associations. The engrav¬ 
ings and photographs too might detain you some time 
in your ramble, if you were wishful to follow the pro¬ 
gress of those arts. 

If we are to be chroniclers of our honours and triumphs 
in this year of grace, we must not omit to record the 
visit of her Majesty, the Prince Consort, and Royal 
Pamily, to our city. The proceedings on the occasion 
were essentially a repetition of those at the inauguration 
of the Exhibition, only our rejoicings were on a more 
demonstrative and magnificent scale. The external 
decorations of our warehouses and public buildings 
were more elaborate; our cheers were more jubilant; 
our triumphal arches were more imposing ; our banners 
were gayer; and our crowds were denser. On the 
occasion of Royal visits, Manchester is unequalled in its 
congregated numbers ; nor can we wonder. Taking a 
radius of thirty miles from our Exchange, the circle in¬ 
closes a larger population than an equal one having the 
metropolitan St. Paul’s as its centre ; and to Manchester 
there are approaches by railway from all parts. Nor are 
you more surprised at the tens of thousands that line 
miles of streets, than at their order and good humour. 
The day proved very unfavourable; heavy showers fell 
at intervals, and many a bonnet suffered: the only 
thing not damped throughout the proceedings was the 


38 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


loyalty of the people. ‘ Here’s a gradely “ thrutching,” 

Mr.-said a kindly tempered woman with a child 

in her arms, addressing us by name, as we were pushing 
our way through a crowd ; ‘ it’s thronger than three in 
a bed ! ’ ‘ Well, it may,’ we replied, ‘ but it is a long 

time since we have experienced that pleasure. But 
why bring your baby into such a crowd ? ’ ‘ Why, bless 
its little heart,’ she said, 1 that it may see the Queen, 
to be sure: it may never have the chance again.’ 
You may observe here and there in the confusion 
some unsophisticated traits of Lancashire character; and 
you may hear some rough specimens of Lancashire wit; 
but there is no intentional rudeness or unreasonable ill 
humour. The most outrageous sight that fell under our 
notice during the day, was a pedestrian here and there, 
towards evening, who, in the loyalty of their hearts, 
had been imbibing sundry strong potations to her 
Majesty’s health and happiness—men with an austere 
gravity of countenance, but whose legs, do what they 
might, would not dutifully respond to their will. 

We are not sure whether the sub dio spectators were 
not quite as orderly as those under the roof of the Exhi¬ 
bition building. Carriages by hundreds had deposited 
their fair occupants at the entrance needlessly early, and 
when the doors were opened, the crush, we were told, 
was fearful; crinolines were doubled up like collapsed 
balloons; ladies were rolled on the floor; ankles were 
exposed; active girls cleared the prostrate at a spring; 
while others, less nimble, tumbled over them, and lay at 
full length themselves, like the rolling fellows on Web- 



MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 39 


ster’s 4 Slideand the whole extempore scene was 
enacted amidst becoming shrieks, groans and exclama¬ 
tions. A reporter was shoved bodily through a window, 
and found himself, as we heard, like the boy Jones, in 
the apartment fitted up for the Queen. The struggle 
was for seats within sight and hearing of the royal party, 
—evincing a strong feminine curiosity, to be sure, but 
at the same time a right loyal spirit. Indeed, if we 
must confess the truth, the curiosity and the loyalty of 
the ladies almost led them into discourtesies; for in 
their anxiety to see her Majesty, the Prince Consort, 
and especially the affianced pair,* they must needs mount 
upon chairs, and in their ample proportions act as view- 
obstructors to those behind. Gentlemen however took 
their revenge by a little harmless banter. An impudent, 
waggish fellow at our elbow undertook to discuss the 
question of propriety with a richly dressed lady in front, 
-who was apparently from one of the neighbouring towns. 
4 If, ma’am,’ he said, seriously, ‘your father had been a 
glazier, he might have put a window in you, so that we 
could have seen through you ’—she turned round with 
a fierce glance — 4 but as you are a dense medium ’—she 
was sixteen stone, and needed neither bustle nor crino¬ 
line—‘ an opaque body-’ 4 A what kind of a body ?’ 

she retorted, angrily — 4 I’m as respectable a body, I 
hope, as you, any day of the week.’ Her Majesty tried 
our patience rather severely; for instead of dismissing 
us about one o’clock, according to programme, when the 
indicator points to dinner in the Manchester stomach, 

* The Princess Royal and the Crown Prince of Prussia.—1866. 


40 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


she kept us waiting till three; and yet, to our loyalty 
be it said, no whisper of complaint was heard. 

The question is now started—How far has the Man¬ 
chester Exhibition been a success ? Some may speak 
disparagingly of it; but surely men must have formed 
their expectations on a very transcendental type, if they 
have not been fully satisfied with the general result. 
We care not to inquire into the balance-sheet of the 
executive committee : this is the most vulgar of all 
tests. The whole arrangements have been singularly 
business-like and judicious : the heaviest charge against 
the Board of Management has been, that the turnstiles 
were not capacious enough for the inflated proportions 
of the ladies. Perhaps the only real drawback to be 
remembered was the irruption of water into the building 
on the Saturday next after the Queen’s visit. We hap¬ 
pened to be there at the time, and the scene was an ex¬ 
citing one. After a sultry day, the clouds gathered, 
and a thunder-storm passed over the palace. The 
thunder rolled very heavily along the roof, and the 
lightning flashed through the interior with unusual 
vividness; then the rain came down like hail on the 
glass ceiling, and, the gutters not being large enough to 
carry it off, it gradually over-flowed, and poured like a 
cascade into the nave, playing upon the cases that con¬ 
tained the gold and silver plate, the china and the 
majolica ware, drenching naked statues, and splashing 
on knights in armour. Most of us were seriously 
alarmed for the treasures of art, seeing that some six 
millions’ worth of property was under the roof. Some 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 41 


visitors however seemed to take it coolly. 1 Is it not 
awful, sir ? ’ a boy who sold catalogues said to us ; 1 and 
see, there are two men laughing ! ’ The mischance was 
prudently hushed up, and it proved that less damage 
had been done than we might have expected. 

But what will be the permanent effect of the Exhi¬ 
bition upon our people ? In April and May we were 
cheered with hopeful prophecies of the wondrous changes 
it was destined to work upon us. We were told how it 
would teach pictorially, those who were unable to read 
alphabetically—how artisans would derive instruction 
in the respective departments of their employment— 
how the Manchester man was to soar above his cotton, 
and become a poet in imagination, and a connoisseur in 
matters of taste. These no doubt are pleasing antici¬ 
pations, such as float around the initiation of any great 
enterprise, and are moulded into well-balanced sentences 
by eloquent writers; but they must always be under¬ 
stood with some reservation. It is difficult at all times 
to describe a glowing prospect in unexaggerated lan¬ 
guage. That our artistic taste has been improved in 
some degree, we are glad to believe ; but our distinctive 
characteristics will not be found to have undergone any 
talismanic transformation. Manchester, we assure our 
friends at a distance, still rejoices in calicoes, loves a 
bargain, and delights in an order for a five-hundred- 
pound parcel. 

That the general effect of our Exhibition will be to 
refine and elevate the taste, there can be no doubt. 
Upon the operative it will have that effect in some 


42 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


degree. From the early part of August, the executive 
committee, with commendable liberality, reduced the 
entrance money to sixpence on a Saturday afternoon; 
and then very many of the poorer classes visited the 
Exhibition who would not otherwise have done so. 
Many, we know, enjoyed the scene, and were capable of 
appreciating the panorama of wealth and beauty that 
passed before their eyes. Our tradesmen too spent their 
pleasant afternoons there, and returned home, wondering 
at the powers of which the human mind and hand are 
capable. Our gentry with their season tickets and spare 
time enjoyed their rambles through the building, and 
could not but bring away a more elevated and refined 
perception of artistic skill. But we do not look upon 
such Exhibitions so much as art-educators to the many, 
though they may be to the few : we admire them the 
rather as exercising a good moral and social influence 
upon all. And indeed we are not sure whether the 
science of the art connoisseurs is so much to be envied. 
We doubt whether, in many who make large critical 
pretensions, there be not a vast amount of empiricism 
and caprice. After all we have read of the pictures in 
our Exhibition—how beauties to one connoisseur are 
defects to another—how a specimen long supposed to 
have been an original, is poohpoohed as a copy—how an 
inferior article in the estimation of one, is exalted into a 
marvel by another—how one critic lays down a general 
proposition and another as flatly denies it, even on 
principles of art—we are inclined to think that the 
question of Pilate, 1 What is truth ? ’ is as applicable to 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 43 


pictures as to morals. Then, we observed that the 
building was a pleasant promenade for ladies in expan¬ 
sive crinolines, and gentlemen in luxuriant whiskers. 
With these classes we have nothing to do, artistically: 
let the registrar of marriages and births look to it. 

We may not take so exalted a view of the popular 
effects of our Exhibition as some have done. But we 
are not sure whether men who have once mounted an 
educational hobby are not disposed to ride it to death. 
We are by no means intending to undervalue the genial 
influence of our unequalled collection of art treasures 
upon our people, in its various agencies, direct and 
collateral. It has given pleasure to tens of thousands, 
while it has not injured one. It has improved all its 
visitors in some degree; for though they may not 
generally have acquired any definite perception of the 
rules of art, they have gone away admiring the beautiful 
creations of men’s hands, and carrying with them 
pleasant memories: they have embedded in their 
thoughts historic associations which link together the 
dead and the living, the ideal past and the realities of 
the present, and which tend to disengage the mind 
from the selfishness of daily cares and material pursuits. 
It has too, we have reason to believe, been in some 
degree a counterpoise to our money-making instincts, 
by imparting a more artistic tone to our social conversa- 
tiqns, and something of idealism to our habits of thought. 
In all this there are educational effects, imperceptible 
though they may be—effects, as we think, more really 
valuable than the dubious knowledge of critical rules 


44 MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 


and the equivocal qualifications of the professed con¬ 
noisseur. And in addition to all this, we have witnessed 
that mingling of classes—that mutual interchange of 
sentiment in heart and act—those graceful condescen¬ 
sions of royalty—those kindly evidences of sympathetic 
regard from our nobility, our landed proprietors, and 
our wealthy merchants, for our humbler men of trade 
and toiling operatives,—out of which spring loyal feel¬ 
ings and grateful dispositions, honest sentiments and 
contented hearts, ‘ peace on earth and good-will to¬ 
wards men.’ 

But whatever be the effect of the Exhibition on our 
artistic skill and aesthetic perception, we shall next year 
remember it with a pleasing regret. When the winter 
months melt into spring, and the warm sunshines forth, 
and the breezes blow soft and balmy, we shall look in 
vain for that stately palace through which we wandered 
so often, beguiling ourselves of the world’s carking cares 
by living for a time in the memory of the past, or in an 
ideal of the present. The scene as a whole will have 
disappeared, and the elements of the marvellous creation 
will have been scattered in a thousand directions. Such 
is the law of change. Where are the representatives of 
those portraits that decorate the walls of the building ? 
Kings, who ruled their fellow-men for good or evil— 
statesmen, who immersed themselves in the anxieties 
and machinations of office—ecclesiastics, who shook the 
world with their denunciations — generals, of whose 
battles crowns were the stake—philosophers, who dived 
into the mysteries of mind and matter—wits, who set 


MANCHESTER ART EXHIBITIONS OF 1857. 45 


the table in a roar—poets, whose thoughts yet live— 
orators, who bound the bar and senate in their spell— 
engineers, who bade the earth yield to their skill and 
turned the ocean into a pathway—‘our fathers, where 
are they ? ’ Where are the hands that wrought these 
marvels of art? Where are the cunning fingers that 
elaborated those curious devices in ivory and wood, in 
glass and stone, in gold and silver ? Where is the arm 
that strung that old English cross-bow ? Where is the 
head that wore that rust-corroded, battered helmet ? 
Where in a century will be the hundreds of thousands 
that have inspected these treasures of art ? So will 
dissolution and change preside over creation, even 
till the earth herself, with her ten thousand summers 
and winters, grows grey and aged and weary with her 
revolutions, and at length, with her stately palaces and 
art treasures, 1 shall fall down as the leaf falleth off 
from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig-tree.’ 


46 


A THRENODY AS TOUCHING 


II. 

A THRENODY AS TOUCHING THE EAST 
WIND. 


What rivers of ink have been used up—what reams of 
paper have been consumed—in dissertations upon the 
ills of life ! The ancient Greek catalogued them with 
scientific precision ; the Roman sage bemoaned them as 
inevitable; the doctors of the Middle Ages dissected 
them with the eagerness of anatomists ; modern moralists 
improve them for our good. From the earliest period 
of antiquity to the present time, philosophers have dis¬ 
cussed them, historians have chronicled them, poets have 
sung them, novelists have depicted them. Now, is it 
not a marvel that one of the greatest ills in life, if not 
the ill, has escaped the notice of all our philosophers, 
historians, novelists, and poets ? Is there any dispensa¬ 
tion we are called upon to endure, to be compared with 
an east wind ?—any from which an escape is so utterly 
impossible ? Are you troubled with a smoky chimney 
and a scolding wife? Then give your chimney a 
thorough sweeping and your wife a lively shaking. 



THE EAST WIND. 


47 


Has your spouse an inclination to indulge in strong 
drinks ? Very well; get rid of her : divorce a mensa 
et tlioro is now a cheap commodity before a stipendiary 
magistrate. Has your daughter eloped with the groom? 
You are far better without them. You may have risked 
your money in the Royal Diddleton Joint Stock Bank ? 
Then go to work like a man and earn some more; 
exertion will do you good. Are you troubled with 
dyspepsia? Fly for refuge to Cockle’s pills. From 
almost all the ills of life, a vigorous, spirited, clear¬ 
headed fellow may escape; but before an east wind the 
man who combines the strength of a Hercules with the 
wisdom of a Solon is as powerless as an infant. Before 
it he must succumb; he may grin and abide with a 
Stoic’s endurance, or he may brave his tortures with a 
martyr’s faith ; but yield he must at length. Neither 
can he escape. The east wind is a subtle and uncom¬ 
promising detective; it ferrets you out of your hiding 
place, and holds you as fast as a handcuff. Suppose 
yourself out of doors : it meets you full in the face; it 
drives you home; it pursues you into your snuggery 
like an ill-mannered bore : draw the curtains, and ring 
or tea,—it still hangs around you ; crawl upstairs in 
your evil plight,—it mocks you still by its icy saluta¬ 
tions ; creep between the sheets,—it yet embraces you 
like a resuscitated skeleton. It follows you into your 
dreams; it brings with it nightmares and horrible phan¬ 
toms; it drags you down precipices and pitches you 
over church-steeples, and leaves you surrounded by mad 
bulls. Talk of hunger and thirst, loss of health and 


48 


A THRENODY AS TOUCHING 


wealth, blighted friendship and sullied fame ! They 
are nothing to an east wind. 

Blow, blow, thou winter wind, 

Thou art not so unkind 
As man’s ingratitude. 

So wrote Shakspeare. But we do not doubt a man of 
his intelligence would have qualified his sentiment with 
a mental reservation, when the wind was in the east. 

No poet has ever written an ode to the east wind : we 
mean an east wind pure. We know that the Rev. C. 
Kingsley has composed an ode to the north-east wind, 
—not amiss in its way; but in our opinion too compli¬ 
mentary, even though this hybrid breeze may have 
acquired a combination of some amiable elements from 
the cross. But we are treating of the east wind, 
undiluted, unsophisticated, undisguised, in puris natu- 
ralibus ; and we repeat that it has never yet found an 
eulogist, even amongst the most imaginative of men. 
Nay, it has not been so much as dignified by a dirge. 
Every other wind has been fortunate enough to meet 
with some sentimental gentleman or lady to build the 
lofty rhyme in its praise; but that from the east has 
ever been ‘ unhonoured and unsung,’—we cannot say 
i unwept.’ Nor can we wonder at this: it is the harbin¬ 
ger of suffering to body and mind; it brings a long 
catalogue of griefs in its train. 

All the infections that the sun sucks up 
From bogs, fens, flats— 

are scattered broadcast by it as it sweeps along. Take 


THE EAST WIND. 


49 


up a quack doctor’s advertisement, and the numerous 
maladies he professes to cure by a single drug are its 
baleful progeny. Coughs, sore throats, bronchitis, lum¬ 
bago, rheumatism, aching of the bones, toothache, gout, 
corn-twitching,—alas, for suffering humanity when the 
wind is in the east ! Shakspeare had experienced its 
visitations, if we may judge from the truthfulness of the 
lines— 

When all aloud the wind doth blow, 

And coughing drowns the parson’s saw. 

Listen to that clergyman in his distress; he is preach¬ 
ing against a battery of five hundred coughs; he is an 
illustration of that sublimest of all spectacles—a brave 
man struggling with the storms of fate. The east wind 
now brings its plagues upon the earth, as of old it brought 
the locusts on the land of Egypt. Your skin is burnt 
up as it blows on you; your lips are parched and cracked; 
you shave in agony, fetching blood at every stroke of 
your razor; you leave your dressing-room, a spectacle 
to be pitied. Your mind is all the while in a state of 
distraction and depression, bordering on irresponsibility, 
and you have occasionally chilly temptations to press 
the edge of your razor against the carotid artery. The 
east wind too seems to delight in the mischiefs it 
creates; it is spiteful and vindictive. When Virgil 
depicts iEolus in his cave, controlling his winds as 
though they were so many bulldogs, giving one a kick 
with* his foot, another a smack with his hand, another a 
thump with his trident, thundering at them with his 
loudest voice, and bidding them lie down, while the 
VOL. II. E 


50 


A THRENODY AS TOUCHING 


mountain side resounded with the subterranean roar, 
you may depend on it that Eurus was the most trouble¬ 
some of the pack.* What satisfaction it would have in 
annoying the cross old keeper ! What malicious plea¬ 
sure in dashing against his shins, and almost carrying 
him off his feet! And when those winds were let 
loose in their work of devastation, Eurus is always 
foremost in tbe chase,—like the 1 souple jad,’ Nannie, in 
Tam O'Shanter , 1 far before the rest,’—and most jubilant 
in mischief, rolling the mighty billows to the shore, 
laying bare the very bed of ocean, and scattering far and 
wide the Trojan heroes and their fleet. 

Tres Eurus ab alto 

In brevia et Syrtes urget, miserabile visu. 

There is a deceptiveness too about an east wind. It 
sometimes indeed roars and drives madly along under 
a cloudy sky. It is then a fair foe: you know what it 

* Thus raged the goddess ; and with fury fraught, 

The restless regions of the storms she sought, 

Where, in a spacious cave of living stone, 

The tyrant JEolus, from his airy throne, 

With power imperial curbs the struggling winds, 

And sounding tempests in dark prisons binds. 

This way, and that, the impatient captives tend, 

And, pressing for release, the mountains rend. 

High in his hall the undaunted monarch stands, 

And shakes his sceptre, and their rage commands; 

Which did he not, their unresisted sway 
Would sweep the world before them on their way; 

Earth, air, and seas, through empty space would roll, 

And heaven would fly before the driving soul. 

iEneid , i. 50-63. Dry den. 


THE EAST WIND. 


51 


means. But it often comes forth more mildly when the 
sun is shining, and spring seems near at hand, and 
everything around looks cheerful. At that time you 
must be on your guard. Then you are tempted to put 
away your overcoat, and inevitably you carry home 
with you a troublesome cough. Then the invalid with 
a consumptive tendency must be most careful. He is 
often deluded to destruction by the pleasant prospect 
from his window : keep indoors, sir, if you wish your 
days to be prolonged. 

We have never been able to learn what are the ingre¬ 
dients in an east wind which make it so prejudicial to 
health. Has no one of our chemists ever caught, bottled, 
and analysed a quart of it? We care, however, very 
little about its chemical ingredients when we are 
howling, like a Caliban, from its effects; we care but 
little for scientific terms when we are suffering under 
the inquisitor’s screw. And who does not suffer ? We 
have our doubts about the Red Indian and the Re¬ 
viewer, the New Zealander and the newspaper editor, 
the Esquimaux and that very austere censor who signs 
himself ‘Junius Brutus’ in the public journals; but 
perhaps even such thick-skinned beings, though they 
may be regardless of the shrieks of human victims, are 
not quite beyond atmospheric influence. We wonder 
much what would be the moral character of a person 
who never in the least degree felt the effect of an east 
wind. We should be sorry to domesticate with him 
or her : if a man, we would not willingly meet him in a 
lonely lane after sunset, unless we had a revolver in our 
E 2 1 


52 


A THRENODY AS TOUCHING 


hand. He must be a being without sensibility, a Fran¬ 
kenstein without a moral sense. And looking to the 
female side of creation, we should be sorry to select for 
the wife of our bosom a woman who was impervious to 
the east wind. Such, we doubt not, were Madame de 
Brinvilliers, Mrs. Manning, and that old lady who mur¬ 
dered her apprentices and hid them in the coal hole. 

But while we do not hesitate to speak disparagingly 
of an east wind per se, we by no means deny that it 
bears its fitting part in the economy of nature. The 
agriculturist welcomes it at certain seasons; not that it 
has any attractions so far as his own personal comfort is 
concerned, but it acts favourably on certain portions of 
his land. When the clods have been turned up by the 
plough, hard and stiff, and have lain through the 
winter’s frost and snow, then comes the dry east wind 
with the early months of the year, and penetrates the 
almost impermeable clay, pulverizing it and reducing it 
to a fertile mould. The farmer then can 4 work ’ his 
ground, and though he may shiver through the process, 
he acknowledges the benefit of that sharp incisive breath 
which breaks up his fallows, opens out his soil to air 
and rain, and enables him to sow his seed with the 
prospect of an abundant crop. The more we look into 
nature, the more we see design, and yet somehow our 
philosophers now-a-days, while they admit the marks 
of design, by a paradoxical species of reasoning, seem to 
rejoice in repudiating a Designer. 4 Pooh ! pooh! ’ is 

the common exclamation of our present deep-thinkers,_ 

4 arguments that might have satisfied Paley ! arguments 


THE EAST WIND. 


53 


that might have satisfied Paley! ’ Is science now in itself 
a paradox? We have serious doubts whether we are 
much in advance of our fathers, except in pertness, 
assurance and self-conceit. 

But even tried with reference to human discipline, 
we may perhaps find that the east wind is not without 
its purpose. It would not be well that every wind 
should excite in us the same sensations ; it would be 
contrary to all analogy in the natural world. The south 
wind one while cheers us with its balmy salutation, 
exhilarating the spirits, giving elasticity to the limb, and 
causing the blood to mantle on the cheek as the symbol 
of health and joy ; the north wind has its periods of 
activity, and fulfils its vocation becomingly, freezing us 
with its keen breath, arresting rivers in their course, 
and decorating city and solitude, mountain and valley, 
field and forest, with its fantastic drapery of unsullied 
snow, but still not unkindly in its influence, and meet¬ 
ing us half-way in healthy enjoyment; the west wind 
blusters and roars and bullies, disturbing tiles and 
chimney-pots, scattering haystacks, making frigates scud 
before it like feathers, impeding old women who are 
turning a corner by a dash full in their face, inflating 
the petticoats of young ladies, turning umbrellas inside 
out, and scattering its plashing showers over the wide 
earth, but, notwithstanding, a very amiable wind with 
all its noise, meaning well with all its rudeness, frighten¬ 
ing us with its bark rather than injuring us with its bite. 
But when we come to the east wind, we have nothing 
to urge in its behalf, except that, according to all analogy 


54 


A THBENODY AS TOUCHING 


in nature, its unhealthy influence is intended to be a 
set-off against the healthier agency of its more amiable, 
kindly-tempered sisters. Where do you ever see a 
family of half a dozen, however well regulated, in which 
there is not a wicked, impish Flibbertigibbet, who is 
ever creating mischief; or a sour, selfish ne’er-do-weel, 
who robs the rest of some portion of their weekly allow¬ 
ance of pocket-money ? Universal good would never 
suit our present condition. While all is not good within 
us, it would be an injurious dispensation to us if all 
were good without. Suffering is the school of patience. 
With the varying breezes we have varying sensations ; 
and when the east wind shrivels us up like a dead leaf, 
it is intended to teach us a lesson of patience, and to 
suggest to us emotions of gratitude for the sunny gales 
that bid the flower bloom and the bud expand. Wher¬ 
ever we turn in the natural world, we see a mixture of 
the good and the evil, of the useful and the useless; we 
find the bramble growing in the corn-field, and the 
poisonous plant amidst the nourishing herbage. So in 
morals : the truth is, our ills are often our greatest 
blessings, even as the very sensibility to pain is our 
chief preservation from danger. Take a bird’s eye view 
of bodies in association, and you will perceive how 
wisely opposites are mingled, producing a beneficial 
effect, like chemical bodies in combination. When you 
look upon the collective wisdom of our nation, as 
gathered into the House of Commons, are you surprised 
to find among its members so many specimens of the 
noodle-tribe ? Be not astonished, good friend ; know 


THE EAST WIND. 


55 


thou that human nature must exhibit more aspects than 
the winds in order to constitute the tout ensemble of 
humanity. Listen to that drawling bore; mark that 
consummate puppy ; hear that stinging wasp ; look at 
that solemn fool. You are astonished? Why, man 
alive, there is nothing extraordinary in what you see. 
It takes many incongruities to make a congruity; it 
takes many blockheads to make up a world of intel¬ 
ligence. Are, again, our hereditary legislators all ge¬ 
niuses ? Do they imbibe wisdom with their mother’s 
milk ? Are they cradled in lofty imaginations ? Did 
Pallas Athene weave their lace caps and long frocks ? 
Just as the case may be. Every aristocrat is not a 
Solomon, as Mr. Jenkins would overpaint him, neither 
is every aristocrat a goose, as Mr. Dickens would cari¬ 
cature him. Some are amiable and clever, while 
others, by a merciful Providence, have been placed above 
the necessity of earning their daily bread by their own 
wits. The descendant of a Norman baron may not be 
better stocked with mental furniture than Christophero 
Sly, who claimed an equally tedious series of progeni¬ 
tors. Nay, out of twelve Cabinet ministers, the selection 
from the select, elegant extracts from the page of wisdom, 
the posy from the legislative flower-garden, we are sure 
to find a fair proportion who illustrate the well-known 
aphorism of Oxensteirn. Do you require illustrations? 
Then take our Parliamentary history and real passim. 
If we had not a horror of personalities, we might select 
some amusing instances of empty heads pinnacled on 
high places, and some comical specimens of human 


56 


A THRENODY AS TOUCHING 


nature in ministerial Cabinets, about whom your only 
feeling is one of wonder how on earth they got there. 
Never expect perfection in this world. An optimist is 
himself an illustration of amiable simplicity. Would 
Convocation be a real convocation if it consisted exclu¬ 
sively of judicious men ? Would a Town Council be 
a totality without a large asinine admixture ? Nay, do 
we not hear an occasional bray from the bench of 
Bishops ? 

And viewing the action of the east wind upon indi¬ 
vidual discipline, it seems to have an especial fondness 
for assailing those who might otherwise have been above 
the common ills of mortality. Some of our most distin¬ 
guished fellow-countrymen have been and are martyrs 
under its inquisitorial visitation. While the mighty and 
eloquent of the earth are riding on in their prosperity 
and ‘ pride of place,’ commanding in their mental facul¬ 
ties and territorial possessions, solaced in their princely 
mansions with every luxury and means of indulgence 
which this world can supply, then comes the first twinge 
of gout, or lumbago, or sciatica, or rheumatism, at the 
touch of the east wind, and the man of rank and lordly 
domains feels at once that he must gird up his energies 
and powers of endurance for a stern combat with in¬ 
firmity and pain. Sweeping onward in its fierce, deter¬ 
mined, relentless career, the bitter blast conveys to the 
great by its merciless whistle the message which was 
delivered daily under a milder form to the Macedonian 
monarch,—‘ Remember that thou art a mortal! ’ 

1 It is an ill wind that blows nobody any good,’ says 


THE EAST WIND. 


57 


our proverb. We respect a proverb : it is tlie embodi¬ 
ment of a national or local sentiment, and it contains a 
general truth, the result of a large induction of facts. 
The meaning of this proverb we suppose to be, that 
winds, generally the most troublesome, bring good things 
nevertheless to one here, and another there ; or, taking 
the wider interpretation, that general calamities are not 
without their individual benefits; in short, that there 
is nothing so thoroughly disastrous as not to have some¬ 
thing cheering in it to some or other. The hurricane 
that shatters the East Indiaman on the rocks, is no friend 
to the owners and the creAv of the vessel, but it may be 
a propitious gale to the runagate heir of that old nabob 
on board, who becomes food for the sharks. Then, if 
the invalid moans in an east wind, the physician rejoices: 
its breath is of pleasant perfume to the disciple of Galen. 
If the ancient fashion be ever revived of building tem¬ 
ples to the winds, let the medical gentlemen dedicate 
theirs to that which blows from the east. With what 
satisfaction, not entirely unmixed with benevolence, 
does your smiling iEsculapius drench the stomach of 
that old lady with innocuous drugs, looking sagaciously 
at her tongue, gently pressing her wrist, and determining 
all the while, as soon as the wind changes and the com¬ 
plaint vanishes, to claim all the credit of it for his pills 
and his potions. The gravedigger’s grim countenance 
relaxes into a ghastly smile as he sees the church vane 
pointing eastward. Does not another proverb say that 
‘ a long east wind makes a fat church-yard ? ’ The mute 
rises into jollity in an east wind. The undertaker then 


58 


A THRENODY AS TOUCHING 


gathers in his harvest; he makes his hay while the 
wind blows. ‘ ’Yell, gov’ner, ve must all come to it, 
one day or another,’ said young Mr. Weller to his parent 
on the death of his mother-in-law. ‘ So we must, 
Sammy,’ said Mr. Weller the elder. ‘ There’s a Provi¬ 
dence in it all,’ said Sam. 1 O’ course there is,’ replied 
bis father, with a nod of grave approval. ‘ Wot ’ud 
become of the undertakers without it, Sammy ? ’ 

And while we are on the subject of proverbs, let us 
not forget the one so appropriate to our matter in hand. 

When the wind is in the east 

It is not good for man or beast; 

and we might make a triplet, by adding a line as correct 
as the other two— 

And for herb and grass the least. 

One agriculturist may be glad to see his fallows 
broken up and pulverized by its sharp tooth, but another 
is waiting in vain for his grass to spring, and is supplying 
fodder for his cattle at an expense that tries his temper. 
The seed lies unvegetating in an east wind; the root 
puts forth no shoot of grass; it is as though these under¬ 
ground powers said within themselves, We will not send 
forth our offspring to be spitefully entreated. And if 
the blade has arisen above the soil, at whatever stage of 
growth it may be, it shuts up before the dry touch of 
this viewless worker of mischief, and is lucky if it be 
not withered in its bloom and beauty. Even from the 
most ancient time has this wind brought a bad character 
with it for checking and marring vegetation. For thou- 


THE EAST WIND. 


59 


sands of years it has had its fling for nearly two months 
in the twelve, when it indulges in its wanton freaks,— 
not altogether without use, as we have seen, in the 
economy of nature, but mischievous withal and laughing 
at the mischief it inflicts, like some scapegrace pos¬ 
sessed of intellect, but devoid of all feeling. Very early 
we read of * thin ears blasted with the east wind.’ 
‘ Shall it not utterly wither,’ inquires a prophet of old, 
‘ when the east wind toucheth it? ’ Is not that a strik¬ 
ing image too, where ‘ the east wind coming up from the 
wilderness ’ is said to dry up the fountains and springs ? 
The afflicted patriarch depicts a man in the uttermost 
destitution when he says, that he shall 1 fill his belly 
with the east wind ; ’ and what can exceed the prophet’s 
description of a vain pursuit as he declares of Ephraim, 
that he ‘ feedeth on wind and followeth after the east 
wind ? ’ 

Will you ride with us into the country for an hour or 
so, and take a glance at its condition,—that is, if you 
are resolute enough to face this bitter, piercing breeze, 
which has been now blowing so many weeks? We draw 
up at the door of our old friend, Farmer Dobson. Yonder 
he is in his fields, wrapped up in a heavy overcoat, muffled 
round the chin with a worsted comforter, and stalking 
on somewhat slowly, like a crippled giant. Our friend 
is eighteen stone in weight, and in frame like a Hercules; 
he has an epidermis like a rhinoceros, and lungs like a 
pair of blacksmith’s bellows. But what are these phy¬ 
sical endowments in the face of an east wind ? He has 
got the lumbago, and can with difficulty crawl; he has 


60 


A THRENODY AS TOUCHING 


an attack of the toothache, and can scarcely masticate. 
Dobson is but a pitiable specimen of humanity at this 
moment; indeed, Mrs. Dobson says that he is ‘ very 
cantankerous and snappish,’ and Miss Dobson declares 
that he is ‘ past living with, that he is.’ He himself has 
a theory more strange than philosophical, that the blasts 
enter in at his chest, notwithstanding all his wrappers, 
pass through his back-bone, and go out between his 
shoulders. He has a sort of vague notion that the east 
wind insinuates itself by some subtle means into his 
spinal column, turning it into a sort of German flute 
for the occasion ; and he is now threatening to dislodge 
the enemy from his system, by smoking batteries of hot 
gin and water. We go round his farm yard. It is 
really pitiable to see those young calves and heifers that 
are crouching in their sheds; they look at you with a 
species of patient resignation as though they were going 
to ask the question, Are you bringing us any relief? 
They are of lofty pedigree, having descended from 
Butterfly on the one side and Royal Duke on the other ; 
but rank confers on them no exemption from suffering. 
Then come and inspect the bull as he stands tied up in 
his stall; he is a very majestic animal, polygamist and 
Mormon though he be—the husband of many wives— 
pater gregis ; he was bred by Lord Bulfield of Shorthorn 
Manor, and he has gained several prize medals in his 
day. But, thick as his frontal bone and hide undoubt¬ 
edly are, he is evidently ill at ease from these prevailing 
blasts. How his fine round eye rolls in its socket ! 
How he casts on you a look of disdain, accompanying it 


THE EAST WIND. 


61 


■with a sonorous snort! How despondingly he drops his 
lower lip as though he was cherishing some 1 secret sor¬ 
row ! ’ Oh ! he is quite harmless, you say ? He may 
be, generally ; but we will keep at a respectful distance 
from his mightiness at present. He is living for the 
time being under a sense of ill usage. And do not the 
very pigs seem to be out of sorts ? Look at those three 
fat swine that are lying together lazily and lovingly in 
their stye. Might you not conceive that theirs was a 
life of uninterrupted ease and satisfaction—a sort of 
sensuous, sleepy enjoyment, we admit, like that of many 
a human porker, but enjoyment still ? And yet their 
present sensations are not altogether agreeable. Mark 
the twinkle of that stout lady’s deeply imbedded eye : it 
has nothing of its usual pleasant humour about it; listen 
to that sharp, short grunt,—it is not a genial grunt—it 
betokens ill temper ; see the twistings of that comical 
little tail, which indicate uneasiness. And then the very 
ducks, hens and geese seem dirty and crest-fallen; and 
how that portly old turkey cock raises his feathers and 
gobbles horribly,—whether in grief or anger, he does 
not deign to inform us ! We now stroll with Mr. Dob¬ 
son into his fields; and what do we see? Those fine 
short-horned cows in milk, which will be shown at the 
Royal Agricultural Society in July, seem to be anything 
but prize beasts. Their hair bristles up like the quills 
of a porcupine, their backs are curved like the arc of a 
circle, their ears hang down, their tails droop languidly 
between their legs. Look again at those three-year-old 
colts, usually so sprightly and buoyant. How miserable 


62 


A THRENODY AS TOUCHING 


they look in their rough, penny hides ! How unlike 
their own lively selves when the breezes of June shall 
blow from the south ! The wind alone would make in 
them a difference of fifty guineas a-piece in the market. 
Then see that flock of sheep, apparently impervious in 
their thick fleeces to any kind of atmosphere—how they 
creep behind the hedgerow, shivering and crouching, 
while the breeze whistles over them maliciously! How 
angrily that old ewe shakes her ears and stamps her 
foot, as though she were anathematizing east-winds in 
general, and this one in particular! And now Farmer 
Dobson begins to lament with a sore lamentation, that 
there is not a blade of grass for his cattle, nor any pros¬ 
pect of spring. The fields are bare as the back of your 
hand; the trees are leafless and apparently lifeless ; the 
hedges are brown, naked, and prickly.—By the way, is 
not that a quaint but suggestive simile of Wordsworth, 
in which he likens the sharp face of Peter Bell to the 
wind that cuts the hawthorn fence ?—The very fertiliz¬ 
ing process in the soil seems to be now in a state of 
paralysis. All nature is at this moment ready to burst 
forth into life and beauty; the grass is' struggling to 
spring up, the tree to put forth its leaves and blossoms, 
and the flower to bud and bloom. And all the while 
this east wind sweeps along, chaining up the wrestling 
energies of vegetation, and bidding torpor reign till it 
please to wing its pestilential flight to some other coun¬ 
try. Then we approach a much-enduring labourer 
engaged in the heavy work of deep draining. ‘Well, 
my friend, how are your spirits in this weather ? ’ we 


THE EAST WIND. 


63 


ask. ‘ A’nt got none,’ he answers, curtly. 1 Why, 
you’re badly off, at any rate, if that is the case.’ ‘ No, 
a’nt got a drop of nothing. But, by your honour’s leave, 
I’ve a plaguy bad rheumatiz.’ 

And if we take a view of city life in the present state 
of the atmosphere, it resembles very much that of the 
country. An east wind is a thorough-going leveller. 
Steam-power, through its various agencies, is said to 
have been the great revolutionist of the day among the 
different ranks of society. But there is no such demo¬ 
crat as an east wind. It matters not whether you are 
located on the breezy hillside or in the sheltered valley, 
in the mansion, surrounded by its spacious park and its 
far-spreading oaks, or in the cheerless cottage up some 
dingy alley,—it is all the same; the east wind reduces 
you into one mould, mentally, morally, and corporeally. 
Come, take my arm, and we will crawl up the street. 
We behold first a tall figure with certain cabalistic letters 
on his collar; he is usually ornamental—now he is not; 
neither, so far as we can discern, is he useful. He is 
apparently standing in helpless imbecility. He might 
be a pillar of salt encased in blue cloth. His senses are 
seemingly in a state of coma. Half-a-dozen boys are 
whipping their tops under his very nose; the old toffy 
woman regards him with a mixture of disdain and pity. 
All the humanities, good and evil, have been extracted 
from him, and he stands with no loftier sensibilities than 
an automaton. Next, pity the miseries of these poor 
cabmen. Which are thje more wretched creatures, they 
or their horses ? Out of the face of that miserable Jehu, 


64 


A THRENODY AS TOUCHING 


observe, all the blood might have been drawn and 
infused into his nose, which is as blue as indigo. Then 
see that immense fellow who is driving the waggon with 
its enormous load ; he is swinging and banging his 
thickly-sleeved arms round his thickly-coated body, to 
keep up the sanguineous circulation, but his efforts are 
a failure. The only creature we see that appears to 
have enjoyment in life, is that little shoeless and stock¬ 
ingless girl of ten, who seems to have got used to her 
situation. The dust is driving onward as though we 
were on the Lybian desert—a hard, gritty dust, that fills 
your eyes, and lodges in your ears, and invades your 
mouth if you dare to open it. The sewers too have 
the privilege of emitting unpleasant smells and setting 
the sanitary reformer at defiance. Step in here for a 
moment. We wish to inquire after the state of an 
invalid friend. We find a young lady reclining on a 
sofa, very pale, except about the cheek-bones, where 
there is a suffusion of red colour. She is about eighteen 
years of age ; and though not remarkable for beauty in 
health, her features in sickness, as is often the case, have 
mellowed and softened into an aspect of patient sweet¬ 
ness and calm resignation. Cough; cough ! ah ! this 
east wind. When will it go ? The pillows may be re¬ 
adjusted ; the head may be raised; the mixture may 
be administered; still the cough ; heavy and hollow ! 
O for one week of the warm south wind! It would 
not cure the invalid, but it would alleviate her suffer¬ 
ings. Alas ! how slow this year is gentle spring in her 
approach! 1 Oh ! ’ she thinks, for a moment ‘ if I could 


THE EAST WIND. 


65 


only once -again sit in the warm sunshine, and feel the 
genial breeze on my cheek—if I could look over the 
far-stretching landscape as the trees are clad in green, 
and the hawthorn is glistening in its milk-white 
blossoms—I think I might recover.’ Alas ! for the 
vanity of human hopes. Give up, poor girl, such delu¬ 
sive expectations. If this wind continue, thy days are 
numbered and reduced to few, and thou wilt pass away, 
having experienced but little sorrow in thine unche¬ 
quered life, 

0 soon to thee will summer suns 
Nae mair light up the morn ! 

Nae mair to thee the autumn wind 
Wave o’er the yellow corn! 

And in th-e narrow house of death 
Shall winter round thee rave, 

And the next flowers that deck the spring 
Bloom on thy peaceful grave. 

Is it not strange, in these statistical days, that none 
of our so-much-per-cent. gentlemen has ever weighed 
the east wind in his duodecimal balance ? Nowadays 
the most important and most trivial issues are calculated 
by the per-cent. Mortals die by the rule of practice ; 
marriages are solemnized according to the 1 Tutor’s 
Assistant;' children are brought into the world by the 
i Ready Reckoner ; ’ crime is distributed by decimals. 
Every thing in these times is done, as Mercutio says, 
‘ by the book of arithmetic.’ For instance, Londoners 
who'drink porter, we read, amount to 54J per cent. 
We wish well to their digestions; but who is the three 
quarters ? Is he the son of a tailor ? We do not profess 
VOL. II. f 


66 


A THRENODY AS TOUCHING 


ourselves to know much about such things: we never 
in our life could work a sum in practice; ‘ multipli¬ 
cation was our vexation, and fractions drove us mad.’ 
But let those who never enter a church, or a theatre, or 
a gin-shop, without their ‘ tables,’ ventilate this airy 
question. We have not ourselves the least doubt but? 
that men go mad when the wind blows from the east 
more by ten per cent, than when it comes from all the 
other quarters put together. We have a notion, too, 
that the greatest crimes which have been exposed in 
our courts of justice, have had some relation to the 
atmosphere. Not exactly that we would acquit a bank 
director who has ruined a thousand families by his 
knavery, or a Palmer who despatched his friend by 
gentle doses of antimony and strychnine, on the verdict, 

‘ not guilty, by reason of an east wind.’ Still, we 
firmly believe that there is an atmospheric agency in 
the production of crime. Horace associates parricide 
with indigestion:— 

Parentis olim si quis impia manu, 

Senile guttur fregerit, 

Edit cicutis allium nocentius.* 

He ought to have linked the wringing of an aged 
parent’s neck with the state of the wind. Do not our 
mad-doctors—w r e mean not that they are mad in them¬ 
selves, but skilful in treating mental derangement—talk 
much about moral insanity, uncontrollable impulses, 
homicidal manias, and such like conditions of the mind ? 


* Erodes, III. 1. 


THE EAST WIND. 


67 


May we not with equal probability expect to meet with 
atmospheric insanity and meteorological murders ? 
Cannot our Government establish a system of crime 
signals as well as storm drums ? Will any one venture 
to tell us that this horrible plot against the life of the 
French Emperor would have been hatched and carried 
out, had not all human tenderness and sympathy been 
dried up and withered by these breezes, which have 
been blowing so long from the same inauspicious 
quarter ? 

Nor is it difficult to conceive that crime should pre¬ 
vail in an east wind, when those bad passions which 
lead to crime are at that time especially in agitation. 
When does a man feel that all his evil propensities come 
uppermost so sensibly as then ? It is the atmosphere 
that stirs up the seething pot, and brings all the scum 
to the surface. Envy, hatred, malice, and all unchari¬ 
tableness saturate our moral nature in this condition' of 
the air. Was not that the experimental opinion of the 
kindhearted old gentleman in Bleak House ? Then 
neighbours have the greatest pleasure in quarrelling; 
then critics tomahawk most savagely; then controversy 
assumes its most truculent aspect; then our senatorial 
debaters are most trenchant. Could it be in any other 
than an east wind that our Transatlantic brethren in 
the House of Congress get up a score of extempora¬ 
neous boxing matches by way of gymnastic exercise, 
and then return to their oratory refreshed and invi¬ 
gorated, though in a somewhat rumpled and palpi¬ 
tating state for the moment ? Gentle reader, are you 
f 2 


A THRENODY AS TOUCHING 


eg 

a bachelor, or a widower 7 Never venture on a pro-' 
posal of marriage in an east wind; the lady will either 
reject you or accept you out of spite. Never assail a 
man’s breeches pocket in that state of the atmosphere, 
except it be with a bludgeon or a revolver. If you are 
a clergyman or a churchwarden, avoid a collection 
then; neither attempt to get up any scheme in which 
benevolence and bank-notes are concerned. A man’s 
heart has no more feeling in it in an east wind than an 
India-rubber syringe. If, therefore, you are seeking 
for some favourable opportunity to launch a leviathan 
project, whatever be your mission, do not consider the 
tightness or the elasticity of the money-market—con¬ 
sider which way the wind blows; do not look to the 
state of the Funds—look to the vane ; do not consult 
the cotton circulars—consult the weather almanac. 

The Registrar General informs us in his periodical 
returns, that there are always the fewest marriages in the 
first quarter of the year, and he attributes the fact to 
the slackness of employment that for the most part then 
prevails. We are reluctant to differ from one who is so 
skilful a manipulator of births, deaths and marriages, 
and whose business it is to weigh every thing, from 
men’s occupations to children’s whooping coughs, in the 
balance of averages. But has it never occurred to this 
walking repository of universal knowledge, that it is in 
the first quarter of the year that the east winds prevail ? 
And is it possible to imagine any one, even a coal- 
heaver or a hodman, marrying in such a state of the 
atmosphere ? Who would set out on his wedding tour 


THE EAST WIND. 


69 


with his teeth chattering and his flesh covered with 
goose-skin? Fancy a newly married couple airing 
their love by the sea-shore in an east wind, or ‘climbing 
the dark brow of the mighty Helvellyn,’ while the breeze 
from that quarter was whistling about their ears, and at 
every step was the sensation of asthma. If the weather 
from time immemorial has been proverbially associated 
with marriages and funerals, we do not doubt but that 
there is an instinct in the heart of all, from the Cabinet 
minister to the scavenger, that no good can come of a • 
marriage when the church vane points eastward : they 
feel that love and affection and kindly feeling have then 
evaporated like a ‘ summer-dried fountain; ’ and there¬ 
fore it is to this cause, we humbly submit in the face of 
so great an authority, that the Registrar General must 
look for the paucity of marriages from January to the 
end of March. Then, to what are we to attribute our 
recent commercial panic and distress ? * It is possible 
that a little excusable over-trading, some sleight-of-hand 
manipulation of other men’s capital, a lively attempt 
here and there to see how far a mercantile gentleman 
can trade without any capital at all, a sportive experi¬ 
ment in the soundness of accommodation-bills, an occa¬ 
sional contract made, like a pie-crust, to be broken, 
and entered into, like Shy lock’s, ‘ in a merry mood,’— 
it is possible that these may have had something to do 
in the matter. It is certain that we have had a great 
crash, and seen the smoke of the ruins ascending like a 


[* The Commercial crisis of 1857.—1866.] 


70 


A THRENODY AS TOUCHING 


thick cloud; and, for our own part, we should have 
walked past and watched the uprising dust without 
wasting our pity on the fallen building, had it not 
turned so many poor people out of house and home. 
But may we not trace these eccentricities in otir com¬ 
mercial men in some measure to the east wind ? It 
may not deprive them of responsibility altogether, but 
it blunts the edge of the moral perception; and may it 
not be one exciting cause of that frantic grasping after 
money which seems to come over our trading men as 
periodically as the sea-serpent appears to] an American 
captain ? When the Bank of England raises its rate of 
discount to 9 per cent., you may be sure that the w T ind 
is in the east. 

And when are our political mischances so numerous 
and remarkable as in an east wind? We have just 
seen a statement that February has been the fatal month 
to all our governments for many years back. ‘ Beware 
of the ides of March ! ’ was the warning to the great 
Caesar, and the soothsayer no doubt had his eye to the 
weathercock. And to what are we to attribute the fall 
of Lord Palmerston, but to the wind that has been 
blowing ? * When his Government seemed firm as ‘the 
strong-based promontory,’ it was pushed over like a 
skittle-ball, or an old weather-beaten statue about which 
nobody cared. His Lordship, ordinarily a tactician so 
astute, lost his temper and presence of mind for a season, 
not so much from the ostensible causes which seemed to 

[* The resignation of Lord Palmerston’s Government in 1858. 
—1866.] 


THE EAST WIND. 


71 


operate, but from the irritability of a gouty constitution 
excited by the prevailing wind. 

We wonder whether there be any connexion between 
the preaching simoom and the east wind, which are now 
sweeping over us so boisterously. We know not what 
is to become of us if there be not some cessation after 
a while : who will survive the verbose and ventose 
sirrocco ? Mr. Spurgeon is the original ./Eolus, we 
presume, who has let out of his bags these blustering 
gales. Alas ! we call ourselves a sensible, practical, 
hard-headed people ; but assuredly we are sometimes 
deficient in these matter-of-fact qualities. At one time 
we rejoice in being Johanna Southcotized, at another 
in being Irvingized, at another in being Mesmerized, at 
another in being Spurgeonized. Each fit soon passes 
away, but for the time being we are in a state of 
mental aberration. Duchesses, leaders of fashion, 
patronesses of Almacks, are paraded as ‘ sitting under 
Spurgeon,’ and being his supporters and friends ; gouty 
peers and grave judges of the land hobble down to 
hear Spurgeon; members of parliament and newspaper 
editors rush away to hear Spurgeon; ladies with 
swollen dresses, and gentlemen with fat paunches, crush 
to hear Spurgeon; country cousins think it their fore¬ 
most duty to see Westminster Abbey and to hear Spur¬ 
geon ; used-up opera-loungers one night admire a dancer 
Hinging her legs about somewhat indelicately, and the 
next morning wonder at Spurgeon as he throws about 
his arms after the same reckless manner. This hard- 
headed people, we fear, are but soft-heads after all. Go, 


72 


A THRENODY AS TOUCHING 


if you will, to see a trick of legerdemain by the great 
Wizard of the North, or to hear voices elicited from 
every corner of the room, perhaps from your own 
stomach, by some clever ventriloquist; go, if you please, 
to see some mountebank in the circus, or the Yorkshire 
giant in his caravan ; go, if your taste lies in that direc¬ 
tion, to laugh at Mr. Punch and Mrs. Judy; but if you 
wish to fear God, and do your duty as a man, eschew 
religious legerdemain and pulpit ventriloquism and 
platform mountebankery and spiritual Pnnch-and-Judy- 
ism, and go to your parish church. Better sleep through 
a sermon, if need be, than clap, or laugh, or sneer. 
Then follows the opening of Exeter Hall for a series of 
sermons on Sunday evenings, by preachers of our church 
styled popular; an act which—notwithstanding its pom¬ 
pous patronage by archbishops, bishops, peers, and clerical 
dignitaries—most people, we shrewdly suspect, two years 
hence, will pronounce to hare been that of vain rather 
than far-seeing men. We would open every cathedral 
and church in the kingdom for evening service, where 
there was the remotest chance of collecting even a mo¬ 
derate congregation; nay, we would recommend our 
clergymen to go into the lanes and highways of their 
parishes for the purpose of gathering the poor into their 
places of worship. But whoever has apraetical acquain¬ 
tance with the condition of our operative population, 
must foresee that the opening of Exeter Hall will be inef¬ 
fectual in itsproposed object of reaching our workingmen, 
and impressing them with a permanent sense of religion. 

But now the gale rises with a vengeance; out of this 


THE EAST WIND. 


73 


storm-cave in the Strand the whirlwind of words rushes 
furiously, and at this time everything is bending beneath 
the tempest. Those exhibitions termed 4 revivals,’ which 
have lately been so common in the United States, are 
now extending themselves amongst us. We are con¬ 
fronted on all sides with preachers in the open air. In 
the London theatres, the echoes of 4 Box and Cox * 
have scarcely died away before clerical actors appear at 
the foot-lights. It is not long since we saw a statement 
that a well-known theatrical manager and publican had 
taken a certain hall in Leicester Square, and hired some 
popular Charles Honeyman to exhibit; whether the 
actor belonged to the Established Churchy we did not 
learn. It was announced, too, by placards that the 
entertainment would consist of sacred music as well as 
a sermon, and that the price of admission for the 
Sunday evening would be at the low rate of one shilling. 
Is there to be a pot of beer allowed in addition, as at 
most of the singing saloons ? A short time ago two 
clergymen of whom we know something, in an ancient 
county town abundantly supplied with churches, joined 
with dissenting ministers in delivering on a Sunday 
evening -a series of ‘Popular Addresses’ in an Odd¬ 
fellows’ Hall, a very short distance from one of their 
churches, and were mightily surprised when they 
received a hint from the bishop of the diocese that their 
proceedings were somewhat irregular; so thoroughly has 
this wordy tornado swept away all landmarks. 

And now the dissenting preachers put forth their 
strength; throughout the length and breadth of the 


74 


A THRENODY AS TOUCHING 


land hundreds of wriggling Spurgeons have broken the 
shell, and are now in full play, out-spurgeoning Spur¬ 
geon. Public halls are hired, and crowded too, on the 
Sunday. The most singular subjects are put forth to 
attract the curious. We remember, out of fifty of the 
same kind, such’ as these—‘ Long beds and short blan¬ 
kets, 1 1 Who’s that knocking at the door? ’ ‘ Jack Spratt,’ 
‘ Black puddings and bung-holes.’ And oh ! those 
prints of preachers in our shops—that of Spurgeon ever 
in the centre ! We are met by them at every turn ; 
we are almost driven crazy with the look of them; we 
walk about as in a nightmare, shutting our eyes as we 
pass those print-shops, lest 1 apes moe and chatter at us.’ 
Will not shopkeepers have mercy? Will they not re¬ 
member that there are such things in creation as gentle¬ 
men of a nervous temperament, and ladies of a delicate 
constitution ? And yet these are the preachers for 
attracting a crowd. What is the secret of such popu¬ 
larity ? Come now, you are a young man of an enquir¬ 
ing mind—we will tell you: it is the abnegation of 
everything that savours of gentlemanly taste. The 
buffoon, therefore, who is most effectual in stamping 
out every spark of refinement from his composition, 
will certainly gain the laurel crown from the mob. 
Perhaps, friend, thou hast a notion of thine own quali¬ 
fications for the attainment of popular applause. Thou 
art without doubt a promising young man; thou hast 
arrived at a certain degree of modest assurance which 
some deem impudence ; thou art not troubled with many 
scruples of conscience ; thou hast a powerful voice and 


THE EAST WIND. 


75 

an active frame; thy personal appearance is prepossess¬ 
ing, and thy whiskers are superb. These are valuable 
qualities, it is true; but weigh thyself somewhat fur¬ 
ther. Hast thou the lingering remains of a gentleman 
about thee? Hast thou some indistinct traces of 
scholarly refinement ? Hast thou faith in God and not 
in grimace, in thy Bible and not in buffoonery ? Then 
enter not into competition with the man Avho sermonizes 
on * Black puddings and bung-holes.’ He will outgrin 
thee, he will out-stamp thee, he will out-ventriloquize 
thee. Therefore, go thy way, and be content to let thy 
candle remain under its bushel. 

We are in hopes that out of all this infinitude of words 
scattered to the winds, some good seed may take root, and 
that the stalks of grain may outnumber the tares; but let 
no one expect very much from this rhapsodical hurricane. 
The tendency of our day is not to consecrate secular 
things, but to secularize sacred things. Nor, so far as 
we have seen, has the literary status of our preachers 
been raised by their late efforts. Their printed produc¬ 
tions have mostly been remarkable for their meagreness; 
those we have read have passed before our vision in the 
shape of Pharaoh’s lean kine.* 

[* These remarks seemed to some rather too severe •when they 
were published—at the early part of 1858. "We dp not, how¬ 
ever, either retract or withdraw them. We will yield to no one 
in a sincere desire for the good of our poorer brethren ; but we 
were confident that the means then employed, whilst provoking 
the sneers of some, would not promote the permanent well-being 
of the many. The fire among the thorns has long ago burnt 
out, and left its ashes only behind it. The mind of the present 


A THRENODY AS TOUCHING 


7 6 


We have much still to say on the subject of the east 
wind; we have not yet let flow one-half of our bilious 
bemoanings. But we must lay down our pen, and that 
too for the best of all reasons—because we can hold it 
no longer. Our fingers are paralysed by rheumatic 
gout; and still this melancholy wind is blowing in the 
intensity of its spite. When will it leave us ? It blows 
appropriately at this season of the year, we admit; it is 
a genuine Lenten wind; let the Puseyite luxuriate in it 
and be grateful. It inflicts its penance on Protestant 
and Romanist with more than papal impartiality, no 
indulgences being allowed. Well, before this threnody 
appears in print, the south wind, we doubt not, will 
have breathed gently on the earth’s bosom, and the sun 
will have shone forth with its gladsome beams; the 
primrose will have bloomed in our meadows, and the 
honeysuckle will have flowered in our hedge-rows; larks 
will have risen on their whirring wings, pouring forth 
their joyous song to the rising sun, and men will have 
awoke to a new existence. The remembrance of evils 
is classed by the great Greek philosopher among ‘ things 
pleasant; ’ * and the Trojan hero cheered his companions 
in distress with the reflection, that one day perhaps they 


day is unfortunately, yet unquestionably, cynical and sceptical 
on religious questions: it takes nothing for granted: and while 
it is the duty of every pious well-read naan to persuade, con¬ 
vince, and confirm it in Christian faith, it ought no less to be 
his care, not gratuitously to offend it by indiscretions in action 
or extravagances in sentiment.—1866.] 

* Rhetoric, I. 11. 


THE EAST WIND. 


77 


would have pleasure in recalling to mind their passing 
trials— 

Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.* 

Shall we ever have the satisfaction of looking back upon 
this east wind? May the intensity of our future plea¬ 
sure be in proportion to that of our present pain ! At 
this moment we are an embodied lumbago—rheumatism 
personified—a wheezing bronchitis in flannel—a pin¬ 
cushion of flesh and blood stuck full of pins and needles. 
‘ Touch me not; I am not Stephano, but a cramp.’ 
Oh! 


* JEneid , I. 203. 


OUR FAILURES: COMMERCIAL, ECCLESIAS¬ 
TICAL, PAROCHIAL, AND ORATORICAL. 


It is among our historical records, that Brummell’s 
valet was met one evening on the stairs as he was 
emerging from his master’s dressing-room with half a 
dozen rumpled neckerchiefs in his hand; and in answer 
to an inquisitive look from the visitor, simply held up 
the disarranged linen and said, ‘ Our failures, sir ! ’ The 
expression may seem to some to be an inflated one. 
‘ You may dip it in the ocean, and it will stand,’ said a 
“French perukemaker to Sterne, when the sentimental 
cynic thought that a bucket of water would have served 
the purpose. ‘ Our failures, sir ! ’ And yet, con¬ 
sidering that his master was the inventor of the starched 
cravat, the words scarcely seem too large for the dignity 
of the subject. Remembering that he was himself the 
manipulator in the girdling process, could you have 
expected an answer sermone pedestri ? In his estima¬ 
tion the application of starch to neckcloths was an 
invention which would have eclipsed that of the steam- 
engine or the electric telegraph, and the adjustment of 
a cravat was a greater achievement than the victory at 


OUR FAILURES. 


Waterloo. His heart and being were absorbed in the 
wonders of starch and cambric ; he worshipped them as 
a Hindoo falls down before his pot-bellied idol. Is it 
not Addison who suggests that to the insect within the 
circle of its drop of water, things infinitesimally small 
are of world-wide importance ? So is it with ourselves. 
We are all of us within our drop of water in comparison 
with the universe, and our successes and our failures 
are to each of us events of mighty moment. Mr. 
Holloway believes that the nations are to be cured by 
his ointment; the Reformer stakes his existence on the 
efficacy of a five-pound franchise and the ballot; the 
Chartist thinks that the world turns round on his five 
points ; the Common Councillor imagines that the uni¬ 
verse is bounded by his Scavenging Committee; the 
cobbler is firmly persuaded that there is nothing like 
leather. Our attacks of gout, our fits of indigestion, 
our sufferings from toothache, gather round them 
thoughts and impressions too large for words. Is it not 
of more importance to a man’s individual self that his 
potatoes be properly boiled, or that his corns lie dor¬ 
mant, or that his baby rests quietly through the night, 
than that the colony of British Columbia has been 
planted by the side of the Rocky Mountains, or the 
North-west passage has been discovered in the Arctic 
Seas ? Hence we magnify our spheres of action and 
our personal concernments. When some months ago 
that*enormous cable was uncoiled which was designed 
to link the shores of England and America by an electric 
pathway of thought, it snapped in its lengthening 


180 


OUR FAILURES . 


course; and when men’s expectations were on the 
stretch, and success seemed reasonably certain, the 
attempt proved a failure. Engineers sorrowed, men of 
science expressed their grief, proprietors of shares 
counted the cost, governments felt disappointment, so 
far as abstractions can feel.* Was, however, the failure 
of Brummell’s valet of less moment in his own estima¬ 
tion than that of this world-wide undertaking? We 
can imagine the intensity of Sir C. T. Bright^ first 
distress, when he found that all his well-considered 
arrangements and anxious efforts had been unavailing: 
was not the starch-worshipper’s disappointment almost 
as bitter, when he perceived an unfortunate wrinkle 
creeping over the snow-white cravat, and he had once 
more to cast aside the damaged linen, and try again ? 

But was not Brummell himself a failure ? Has not 
every puppy of the Brummell school proved a failure ? 
Will not every such homunculus in future turn out the 
same? Here was a man without the distinction of 
birth, without the power that springs from wealth, 
without any superiority of intellect, reigning over the 
world of fashion simply by the force of impudence and 
a good figure. Here was a king merely on the strength 
of being a tailor’s block and wearing a starched cravat! 
And yet there must have been something out of the 
common way in a man who could triumph over vast 
obstacles, and dared to sneer at 1 your fat friend,’ even 
though that 1 friend ’ was a Prince who wished to put 


[This paper was written in the autumn of 1858.—1866.] 


OUR FAILURES. 


81 


him down. Perhaps the world of fashion was the goose 
rather than Brummell. O, ye peers and peeresses— 
lords and ladies in high places ! sneer no longer at the 
simple hand-loom weaver as he is led on blindfold by 
some stump-orator, who persuades him that he can pro¬ 
cure by agitation, almost for nothing, food for the poor 
man’s stomach, and clothes for the poor man’s back 
and fire for the poor man’s hearth, and blankets for the 
poor man’s bed ! Are not ye blindly deluded by the 
Brummells of the day, falling down before the stocks 
and stones of fashion, paying your tithes of adulation 
to the ‘ gods many ’ of this world, and forgetting the 
weightier matters of the law? We "would fain hope, 
however, that we are a somewhat improved order of 
beings, in comparison with those who flourished in the 
Regency. Reason has dawned upon our minds; a 
sense of decency and morality has germinated in our 
hearts. We aspire to be men and not minikins; we 
think of doing some good in our generation to those 
around us, and not of spending our time with harlots in 
riotous living, fashioning our god out of the curl of a 
wig or a pair of breeches. We have no wish to speak 
evil of dignities ; we would imitate c Michael the arch¬ 
angel when contending with the devil,’ so far ; but we 
certainly turn with a sickening disgust from the leaders 
of our nation in those days, whether we think of the 
Regent in his palace, or Fox and Sheridan iu the House 
of Commons, or Brummell in May Fair. Let the dead 
past bury its dead. And yet there is an awful moral 
in those ‘ Memoirs ’ of Brummell. See that man, who 


82 


OUR FAILURES. 


had once stood on the summit of the hill of fashion— 
the idol before whom peers and peeresses had bowed, 
and yet the frivolous coxcomb who fancied the whole 
world inclosed in a starched cravat—see him now, after 
having sunk from one depth to another, reduced to an 
eleemosynary subsistence in a foreign land, paralysed in 
body and drivelling in mind—a human wreck drifting 
to the eternal shore—and yet ordering his coach as in 
former days, and bidding some high-born duchess ‘bury 
herself’ in his easy chair ! 

Isolated Financial Embarrassments. 

Our failures ! As a Manchester man, we cannot do 
otherwise than consider the expression first in its com¬ 
mercial, and as such its least figurative acceptation. 
The word failure is a mild one; it is an easy letting 
down from a suspicious eminence. We gloze over 
things by names; we call delinquencies misfortunes. 
But perhaps the term may be a proper one, inasmuch 
as to ordinary conceptions the morality of efforts is tried 
by their issues. If Napoleon had succeeded at Moscow, 
his campaign would have been held up to succeeding 
ages as a wonderful instance of far-seeing strategy ; if 
Wellesley had failed at Assaye, the engagement would 
have been regarded as the act of a madman. Even 
treason, when successful, becomes patriotism. ‘ All is 
fortune,’ as Malvolio says. 

Financial failures are of a very catholic character; 
they are not limited to sections and cliques of the com- 


OUR FAILURES. 


83 


munity; they are above all class-interests; nay, they 
respect neither religions nor nations. Do we not now 
and then hear of an Emperor or King being out at the 
elbows ? Have not Republics repudiated their debts, 
because, we presume, they had not wherewith to pay ? 
This ‘ consumption of purse,’ which Falstaff so patheti¬ 
cally bewailed, seems now to be pressing heavily on the 
successor of St. Peter in the Vatican. Like the Furies 
that pursued Orestes, these derangements of the pocket 
are ‘ daughters of Night, abominable to behold, inhabit¬ 
ing Tartarus and thick darkness, fiiari/iaF avlpibv Kai 
6eCiv 'OXvfjLTrtojv. 1 * They drop down, once in a while, 
on our peerage in its proudest array, in contempt of the 
blood of centuries, and the dozen quarterings, and the 
motto Fide et jiducia —which may be translated, 1 With 
credit and trust.’ On the younger sons of proud peers 
they more frequently exercise their tyranny, dogging 
the heels of those lively youths beyond the limits of Her 
Majesty’s dominions, and then insulting them by issuing 
a proclamation of outlawry against them. They treat 
with the same degree of contumely Baronets of historic 
names and Squires of ancient lineage. In pestering 
young gentlemen of long pedigrees, they are mostly in 
league with betting-books and gambling tables, Tatter- 
sail’s and Newmarket, steeple-chases and blacklegs, 
hunting-boxes and extensive studs, operas and singing 
women. Sweet, no doubt, are the enjoyments of high 
life; exhilarating is the excitement of clearing a five- 


* Eumenides, 72 . 


84 


OUR FAILURES. 


barred gate; precious are the musical tones of foxhounds 
and pretty songstresses; entrancing is the hazard as a 
man has staked his all upon the cast, or as he carries 
himself bravely in the ring before the course is cleared 
for the Derby. But there is a ‘vaulting ambition which 
o’erleaps itself, and falls on t’other side.’ And these 
gallant youths that were once almost as generous as the 
steeds they bestrode, are found at length disguised in 
shady overcoats and hirsute countenances, either at 
Boulogne or in some of those palatial buildings which 
Her Majesty in her kindness and condescension has 
provided for her ardent but erratic subjects. 

But the term failure in its technical sense applies to 
one who, in his endeavours to make either a fortune or 
a living, finds after awhile that his exchequer is empty 
and his Philistine creditors are upon him. This is but 
a phase of every-day life in a mercantile population. It 
is marvellous how little is thought of these unsuccessful 
efforts when isolated. We take the arm of a merchant 
as he is walking to his place of business in the morning. 
‘Any news ? ’ is the first question. Now, the meaning 
of the inquiry is, has any firm failed within the last 
four-and-twenty hours ? ‘ Yes,’ is the reply, ‘ Brown 

Jones, I hear, is gone.’ A stranger would scarcely have 
a right conception of this answer. From the tone in 
which it was delivered he would fancy that Brown 
Jones was one person, that Mr. Jones’s Christian name 
was Brown, or that he had been popularly so christened 
from his swarthy complexion ; but really Brown and 
Jones are two distinct specimens of the human species, 


OUR FAILURES. 


85 


and when we ventured to say ‘ Brown Jones is gone,’ we 
meant the firm. Sometimes we hear of such houses as 
‘Sharpe James’ and ‘Cheap John,’ which from our 
unpointed style of pronunciation convey a somewhat 
ludicrous idea. Like lawyers in their parchments, mer¬ 
chants do not punctuate in their description of firms; for a 
firm, we suppose, so long as it continues such, is under¬ 
stood to be one and indivisible. ‘Is it for much, do you 
know? ’ ‘ Some seventy thousand, I hear.’ ‘ What in 

the pound ? ’ ‘ Half-a-crown, it is expected.’ A word 

parenthetically about ‘ Brown, Jones.’ Mr. Brown has 
a residence in the country, with a Mrs. Brown and 
several young Browns; he has kept his carriage and 
servants in red plush ; he has indulged in the luxuries 
of life at the rate of three thousand a-year. The 
same may be said of Jones. But the firm of ‘ Brown, 
Jones ’ has never fairly cleared six thousand pounds in 
any one year since it was established, and consequently 
from year to year it has ‘ gone to bad,’ and worse. ‘ A 
fine harvest time,’ we continue. ‘ Beautiful! the 
markets are falling already.’ ‘ A frightful accident that 
on the “ Oxford and Wolverhampton.” ’ ‘ Terrible ! ’ 

‘ Capital opening in China.’ ‘ Yes.’ ‘ Good morning.’ 

Such is one of our first-rate failures. It is a gentle¬ 
manly affair enough, so far at least as the amount goes. 
Descend in the scale of society, and you will still find 
plenty of downfalls similar in kind, though different in 
degree. Enter this small house in a fourth-rate street: it 
is very neat inside ; the parlour ornaments and furniture 
betoken that the owner had once lived after a more 


86 


OUR FAILURES. 


expensive fashion. Mrs. Sowdon, the occupant, has 
been a widow now three years, and till lately had carried 
on an extensive business as a linendraper in a leading 
thoroughfare. 1 You see, sir,’ are her words, 1 when my 
husband died, I found things went worse in trade. 
Times were bad, and John did not attend to the shop 
as he should.’ John we knew to be an arrant scape¬ 
grace. Instead of keeping up his father’s business he 
had kept his betting-book, and frequented public-houses, 
and talked race-course slang. He had consequently 
spent everything on which he could lay his hands, and 
then gone off to seek his fortune at the 1 diggings.’ But 
the widow’s worst word about the vagabond was, that 
‘ he did not attend to the shop as he should.’ 1 So,’ she 
continued, 4 1 was obliged by our creditors to discontinue 
the business, and I have come here in a very humble 
way. We paid our debts in full, but besides our few 
remains of furniture we had nothing left.’ 4 Well, but 
notwithstanding, I trust that, in the providence of God, 
you may yet have many comforts. Your daughters 
will be a great support and consolation to you.’ 4 Yes, 
we have reason to be thankful still. My daughters 
have been always strict and steady, and very dutiful to 
their parents; they have submitted to our change with 
more cheerfulness, I think, than myself. Mary, who 
served her apprenticeship to a dressmaker, has begun 
business for herself, and is doing very well. Jane has 
got a place as teacherin Mrs. Fenchett’s boarding-school, 
and returns home in the evening. She was always fond 
of teaching, and she thinks she will be able to go on 


OUR FAILURES. 


87 


still with the Sunday-school class; and Ellen has a 
tolerably good place as book-keeper in Hope and 
Thompson’s large stationery shop; so that I trust we 
shall be very comfortable in our humble way, as we 
shall all live together and help one another. I should 
be more content if I thought John was likely to do well; 
but if we have not all we desire, we must resign our¬ 
selves to God’s will.’ 

Failures descend on the minuendo scale till they 
become infinitesimally small. Only a week or two 
ago we went down into a cellar dwelling, in which we 
found a solitary man seated on a three-legged stool, 
the only piece of furniture in the room. He wore a 
ragged coat and an oleaginous pair of breeches, a wide¬ 
awake hat considerably indented, and a beard of six days’ 
growth. He squinted fearfully, and he w r as smoking 
furiously. He looked a comical picture, as he sat in 
silent gravity, while one of his eyes followed the smoke 
as it curled up the chimney. ‘ What’s the matter ?’ we 
inquired. ‘ Done up ! ’ he replied, puffing out a dense 
volume of smoke—‘ done up bodily ! ’ ‘ What way ? ’ 

‘ Misfortunate in business—broke.’ ‘What in the pound? ’ 
‘ Why, they came and seized my traps—bag and baggage, 
bed and bedding—all my marine stores—and they drove 
off Neddy.’ ‘ They could not seize your son, surely ? ’ 
‘ My jackass it was—as used to live with me here, and 
eat with me, and sleep with me.’ And to the best of 
our belief a tear glistened in his weird-like eye. Kough 
as the fellow looked, we liked him for the love he bore 
his donkey. The man who abuses a dumb animal, 


88 


OUR FAILURES. 


whether he wear broadcloth or fustian, ought to be 
whipped without mercy at a cart-tail. The bankrupt 
rose in our estimation vastly. He might have been a 
Marius in the rough, philosophising over a scene of 
desolation. We have reason to believe that he got 
drunk with the half-crown we gave him ; still, his 
sympathy with his lost Neddy was well worth the 
money. 

This kindly feeling towards dumb animals, however, 
may perchance run into an amiable weakness. We re¬ 
member an instance where it led a clerical friend of ours 
into great inconvenience. In a lowpart of his town parish 
he visited a poor fellow as he lay sick, who had been 
accustomed to go about the country with pan-pipes, a 
spotted spaniel, and a little monkey, which performed 
its tricks on the dog’s back. The man died, and his 
sole effects were the pan-pipes, the dog, and the monkey. 
The lazy spaniel seemed to take the matter with great 
indifference; but the monkey exhibited such unmis¬ 
takable signs of distress, leaping on the bed where the 
dead man lay, and looked so intensely human in its 
tears, that our friend’s heart was melted, and he defrayed 
the expense of the poor fellow’s funeral, and took the 
monkey home, leaving the pan-pipes and the fat spaniel 
behind. Now began his troubles. First, his servants 
gave notice,—they would not domesticate with an ape ; 
after a while however, they changed their minds, and 
became attached to the little creature, dressing it in a 
red coat and cocked hat. But calamities only grew and 
increased. Jacko proved the most comical and teasing 


OUR FAILURES. 


89 


wretch that ever existed : when rebuked, he would sit 
as demure as a school-girl; but then he would watch 
stealthily his corrector from under his eyebrows, and 
when he saw that he was not noticed he would proceed 
in his course of mischief just as before. Our friend, 
passing along the street where he resided on one occa¬ 
sion, found him in his red coat and cocked hat on the 
back of a goat, surrounded by a promiscuous mob of 
boys and girls, men and women, who were applauding 
his tricks. Being a person of retiring disposition, he 
thought to pass by unobserved ; but Jacko recognised 
him, took off his hat, and paid him the compliment of 
a bow which could not have been more graceful or 
reverential if it had been intended for an archbishop; 
But the little wretch’s misdoings at length reached a 
climax. One day our friend, coming to his house, 
found a crowd collected round his gate and railings, 
some laughing, some vociferating, some indignant and 
demanding justice. It proved that Jacko had climbed 
a tree which was in the garden and overhung the cause¬ 
way ; and as a prim old lady was passing he made a 
snatch at her bonnet; and lo ! he brought away bonnet, 
wig, and head-dress, leaving her bare and bald as a 
wigmaker’s block. There was Jacko in the tree, 
waving his spoils in an exulting manner—his spolia 
opima ; here was the old lady, bald-headed and furious, 
screaming in her indignation; around was a miscel - 
laneous gathering of people, indulging in a variety of 
sentiments, some amiable, others objurgatory. Our 
friend was not actually summoned before the magistrates 


90 


OUR FAILURES. 


for damages ; but he compromised the unpleasant affair 
by a handsome payment, and he parted with his trouble¬ 
some domestic to a Zoological Institution, stipulating, 
like a kind-hearted man as he is, that the little creature 
should be well treated. ‘ Jacko,’ he says still, 1 poor 
Jacko had his failings; but which of us has not ? ’ 

Panics. 

A single failure for some hundred thousand pounds, 
we have intimated, is as lightly regarded as the feather 
floating in the wind, except by those who come within 
the immediate sweep of the vortex. It is different, how¬ 
ever, when the explosions come in rapid succession. 
These constitute a panic. About every tenth year our 
commercial world is thrown into convulsions as terrible, 
to use Mr. Disraeli’s simile, as the throes of a Calabrian 
earthquake. First comes a distant rumble, it may be 
from over the water; then follows a subterranean 
movement at home; soon shock succeeds shock in rapid 
succession ; tall chimneys roll on the ground ; palatial 
warehouses sink in ruins; the earth opens her mouth, 
and whole streets go down together into the gulf; men’s 
hearts sink for fear, and when the violence of the con¬ 
vulsion is past, and affairs assume something of their 
former stability, it is found that the wealth of thousands 
has vanished, and the hollowness of assumed wealth has 
been exposed in more; that the schemes of the adven¬ 
turer have recoiled on him, and the tinselled grandeur 
of the speculative trader has passed away like a dis¬ 
solving view. 


OUR FAILURES . 


91 


Nay, even panics are soon forgotten. They who have 
been drawn down in the whirlpool, crawl to shore, shake 
themselves, and again plunge into the deep waters. In 
less metaphorical language, they pass through the Bank¬ 
ruptcy Court, get their second breath, and start again. 
Even the thunder of that shock which so lately startled 
our nation is fast dying away into an echo, and the 
commercial world will soon think no more of it, till the 
periodical return of a similar convulsion after another 
decade.* We are told that at this moment there is a 
large amount of unsound bills, or as we technically 
term it, 1 bad paper,’ in the market. And yet the late 
panic ought to take a mighty deal of forgetting. A 
pamphlet is lying on our table written by ‘ W. Romaine 
Callender, jun., , j’ a gentleman who mixes the utile et 
dulce by combining the pleasures of literature with the 
profits of commerce, which contains the only complete 
and classified account we have seen of our late commer¬ 
cial failures. As its circulation has been for the most 
part local, it may not be inappropriate to give a more 
extended currency to his statements, premising that our 
own city of Manchester has passed through the shock 
with a soundness and stability that are in favourable 
contrast with the commercial weakness and insecurity 
of certain other large trading towns in the United 
Kingdom. 

What, suppose you, was the extent of our failures, 
financially considered ? Hear Mr. Callender. 

* [Written in 1858.—1866.] 

f The Commercial Crisis of 1857; its Causes and Results. By 
Wm. Romaine Callender, jun. 


92 


OUR FAILURES. 


Fifty millions sterling are computed as the liabilities of the 
mercantile houses who have succumbed to the pressure of the 
last few months, and the losses which will result from this sus¬ 
pension are but a small part of those of the whole community. 
The names which appear in the papers are but a tithe of those 
who have met with reverses, and who, in the legitimate course 
of trade, are the producers or exporters of articles which have 
had to be sold at a heavy depreciation. The effect of a com¬ 
mercial crisis is not confined, as is too often supposed, to a knot 
of speculators or a group of merchants in some large emporium 
of commerce; it is felt by the manufacturer, whose mills are 
standing for want of orders, while his stock is lessened in value; 
by the shipowner, whose foreign trade is suspended ; by the 
thousands of operatives who are thrown out of employment; by 
the shopkeeper, whose business is curtailed owing to the increased 
economy of his customers; and through these and a thousand 
other channels it permeates through every grade of society, and 
visits every fireside. So closely are the interests of all classes 
interwoven, that there are few in this country who have not 
experienced during the last few months the forebodings, the 
anxiety, and the loss which accompany a panic. If severe in its 
effects, it has been brief in its duration; and if its results be to 
purify the commercial atmosphere, and to warn us for the future, 
the lesson will not have been too dearly purchased. 

If indeed the effects of a crisis were confined to those 
individuals who in the aggregate have failed for fifty 
millions sterling, but few would interest themselves in 
the matter. These men might be stripped of their tinsel, 
and welcome; But if such adventurers are the moving 
cause of a panic, they have to answer for an accumulation 
of misery which none can imagine but they who have 
been inside the dwellings of the poor at such a time. 
The merchant now contracts his business, and many of 
his warehousemen are turned adrift; the manufacturer 


OUR FAILURES. 


93 


closes his mills, and the operatives are left to keep life 
in their attenuated bodies as they may. We are not 
blaming either merchant or manufacturer, for they are 
simply actuated by that ordinary instinct of self-preser¬ 
vation which guards them from positive ruin. It is a 
state of things inseparable from our present relations of 
trade. But it is a very melancholy sight, as we can 
ourselves testify, that of a purely manufacturing town, 
—such as Preston, Bolton, or Blackburn, when the 
operatives are for the most part unemployed. Some 
few may have saved a little money, but it is soon gone; 
they who have decent clothes take them to the pawn¬ 
shop, but a person can only live a given time on coat, 
waistcoat, and trousers. Many commence a course of 
pinching want without either money to draw or clothes to 
pawn, and consequently, if they come out of it alive, do so 
without loss. And with destitution comes a wide-spread 
demoralisation, and not the least among the females. 
Notwithstanding relief from rates, house-to-house visit¬ 
ing, soup-kitchens, supplies of bedding and blankets, 
which English benevolence is ever ready to afford, the 
marvel is, how many families positively survive through 
months of an existence which is but one degree above 
the point of starvation. 

Mr. Callender attributes this crisis, as we apprehend 
most other people do, to over-trading, with its satellites, 
roguery, trickery, and deception. He thus contrasts 
the merchant and the speculator:— 

The keen rivalry (he says) which exists in the Exchange does 
not cause among commercial men that jealousy which is so often 


94 


OUR FAILURES. 


found in other classes of society. Every one knows that industry 
and capital will make a good return, and that by attending to 
the fixed rules of business, he need not envy his neighbour. 
But in this friendly struggle the man of honour expects to be 
encountered with his own weapons—capital, energy, and prudence, 
and not to be opposed by a man of straw, devoid of honesty or 
perseverance. The speculator is a great contrast to the merchant; 
he is generally a man of limited means, of little prudence, reckless 
of consequences, and ready to embark in any scheme which bears 
a show of profit. If he can obtain facilities for carrying on his 
speculations, what does the result matter to him ? The chances 
of profit are too tempting to be resisted: the loss, if any, will 
fall on those who have given him credit. He rarely does business 
on a small or even a moderate scale: he goes on the principle of 
a ‘ large return,’ probably shipping two or three times as much 
as the merchant would do, and being content with a less profit. 
He is considered * a hard-headed man of business,’ and is called 
a ‘ merchant princehe is a strong advocate for increased paper 
currency, and designates his opponent a ‘ capitalist,’ a ‘ bullion- 
ist,’ or ‘ one of the old school.’ He is known to do an extensive 
business; he pays his accounts regularly; sellers solicit his 
custom, and he continues carrying on large operations, till a 
run of good luck enables him to retire with a fortune, or un¬ 
toward circumstances place him in the Gazette. 

Such a character as this, dangerous and daring as he 
may be, is not without some capital, though doubtless 
it is inadequate to his schemes. Many a speculator 
however begins his bold career without a farthing, 
often when he is considerably worse than nothing, both 
in probity and in purse. He summons to his aid ac¬ 
commodation bills, credulous bank-directors, discount- 
houses, bills of lading—‘facilities,’ as they are called; 
and for a time he swaggers away bravely. When money 
however becomes dear, and a sovereign is worth more 


OUR FAILURES. 


95 


than twenty shillings, then these dashing spirits have 
to look out. When commercial confidence wavers, 
and one trader begins to eye his brother trader askance, 
and to consider what he is worth in the market, then 
these men of straw are sure to lose their feet and get a 
roll in the mud. 

Confidence (says Mr. Callender) is a word which cannot be 
taken in too wide a sense, as it is the life and soul of commerce. 
The business carried on by the aid of money alone is extremely 
limited: the shopkeeper finds it necessary to exercise confidence 
to his customers, and give them— credit ; and every large com¬ 
mercial operation is based on confidence in the honour, integrity, 
and judgment of the contracting parties. There can be no 
higher proof of the ennobling nature of commerce than is afforded 
in the fact, that ninety-nine out of a hundred contracts are given 
verbally; and although no legal proceedings can enforce their 
fulfilment, repudiation on the part of buyer or seller is seldom 
heard of. Imagine the effect that any curtailment of this con¬ 
fidence would exert on trade. Contracts as now given would 
have to be superseded by legal formal documents, with witnesses 
to prove each detail; suspicions would arise of the honesty of 
our servants—doubts of the stability of our customers; and if 
the feeling became universal, business would be at an end. 
What would the diligence of the servant be worth without confi¬ 
dence in his honesty?—or who would confide in the known 
wealth of his customers, if he had a continual fear of being 
cheated? 

Confidence, no doubt, is ‘ the life and soul of com¬ 
merce ; ’ and it is but natural that a merchant should 
rely on the honour of a legitimate fellow-trader. But 
what surprises us is, that men should repose a species 
of confidence on those kite-flying speculators when 
money is plentiful, and draw them suddenly up when 


96 


OUR FAILURES. 


money is scarce. Ought not confidence in trade to be 
measured at all times by the presumed wealth and 
integrity of those in whom it is placed ? 

As illustrative of the way in which business has been 
conducted, Mr. Callender brings forward a long array of 
failures, giving us an insight from official documents 
into their preceding causes. We quote his statement 
of two cases :— 

D. and J. McDonald and Co.—The house of D. and J. McDonald 
and Co. occupied a magnificent warehouse in Glasgow, which 
cost 90,000?.; they were the employers of 39,000 women and 
girls; their business was supposed to be very profitable, and 
their energy and zeal were astonishing. They had half a dozen 
establishments in different parts of the world, and were evidently 
well backed with money. When the rumour of their suspension 
was noised abroad, the local prints denied it, and when it became 
a fact, it could hardly be believed. The promised dividend 
dwindled from 155. to a small sum; and the interrogations of 
the Bankruptcy Court brought out the following curious informa¬ 
tion In September, 1856 (qy. 1853), the firm had a capital of 
nearly 16,000?., and their profit was assumed to be 10,000?. a 
year. An extension of business required a large advance of 
capital, and they paid a commission of one to one and a-half 
per cent, to any one who would assist them by putting their 
name to paper. Michael Banes, since an English bankrupt, 
accepted anything they required, and received a commission of 
one per cent., which amounted to 600?. or 700?. a year. They 
had seven such ‘ drawing posts’ in 1853 ; the number increased 
to ten in 1854, thirteen in 1855, twenty in 1856, and seventy- 
five last year; and their accommodation paper from 16,000?. in 
June, 1849, had risen to 303,000?., exclusive of 60,000?. drawn 
upon Ross, Mitchell, and Co., while the sum paid for discounting 
amounted to 40,000?. in 1857. It was important to have a large 
number of names to draw upon, and the old * drawing posts ’ 


OUR FAILURES. 


97 


were incited to furnish additional ones. Mr. Banes procured 
five, Mr. Cappel thirteen, Francis and Altober eight, J. H. Briggs 
six, and so on. Fifty-five were purely accommodation accounts, 
the other twenty had business relations -with the McDonalds ; 
but excepting the London and Glasgow agents, both of whom 
had goods in hand, all the seventy-five acceptors have stopped 
payment! * 

Michael M'Haffic, in August, 1855, was 10007 worse than 
nothing, but he thought himself quite justified in speculating in 
iron and cotton to a considerable amount. His plan of doing 
business is thus laid down: ‘ I first shipped jointly with a friend, 
drawing upon the house to whom the goods were consigned to the 
extent of seventy-five per cent., and upon the friend for the 
twenty-five per cent.; and thus I was able to pay for my goods 
without requiring any capital , and got my commission as well. 
In the second place, I shipped on my own and on joint account, 
paying three-fourths cash, and getting the agent to draw for the 
remainder. A credit at the Borough Bank, Liverpool, enabled 
me to speculate in tea, iron, shares, and grey goods.’ His avail¬ 
able funds in July, 1857, were 7347 in cash, and a shipment 
of cotton (not yet arrived), which was mortgaged for its original 
cost, but which might realise a profit of 28007 Being dunned 
for money, he bought 5007 worth of jacconets (not paying for 
them), and, on their receipt, divided them between two pressing 
creditors: this system was continued for two months, and he 
considered it ‘ simply a piece of finance,’ which would enable 
him to hold the cotton. His private habits were on a par with 
his commercial integrity; he had four houses, two of them for 
the use of 4 a friend; ’ his bill for jewellery for two years amounted 
to 6497, and his wine bill for the same period to 6387, 3887 worth 
having been consumed in his own house. 


* ‘ Stopped payment I ’ we have heard of a man exclaiming, 
when he was told that a customer had been driven to that neces¬ 
sity,—‘ I should like to know when he began payment; for I ve 
fingered none of his brass yet.’ 

VOL. II. 


H 



98 


OUR FAILURES. 


Mr. Michael M { Haffic had 1 a credit at the Borough 
Bank, Liverpool.’ We have as little patience with 
these delinquent bank directors as we have with the 
Michael M‘Haffics. Instead of a few months’ generous 
living in one of our gaols, we would ship them off to 
Norfolk Island. 

None (says Mr. Callender) took a more active part in assisting 
speculation than four of the suspended banks, and their paid-up 
capital and deposits gave them ample means to do so. One 
establishment has been the guardian of Monteith, M ‘Donald, 
Wallace, Patterson, and others. A second has advanced to Carr, 
Brothers, & Co., and the Consett Iron Works, double the amount 
of its paid-up capital, and has besides two or three debtors for 
two or three hundred thousand pounds each. Another, unwarned 
by losing 370,000^. with Mr. Oliver, in 1854, is a large creditor 
on De Wolf and Doherty, while the suspension of the last brings 
down the same day six or eight large ironmasters! All these 
banks were hard pressed in 1847, but instead of increased caution 
they have displayed greater recklessness than ever. 


The Church of England. 

But we leave this plain matter-of-fact species of failure, 
about which there can be no mistake, and we come to 
some other kinds, around which a little discussion may 
probably gather. When a man is sold up, and, in spite 
of wife and daughters, his drawing-room furniture comes 
under the auctioneer’s hammer,—or when he appears in 
the Insolvent Court in the presence of judge and opposing 
creditors for the purpose of scheduling out,—or when 
he hastens off incog, by an evening train for Liverpool, 
to take ship for New York,—the incident is a positive 


OUR FAILURES. 


99 


one; it defies the reasoning of the dialectician or the 
lawyer ; it is ranked in the class of facts. But we hear 
of failures every day, concerning which some doubt may 
arise, however confidently our next-door neighbour may 
express his opinion upon them. Of all the problematic 
failures of the nineteenth century, that about which 
opposite assertions are most confidently hazarded is the 
Church of England. 

We are ourselves inclined to deny that it is a failure; 
we sometimes venture to think, in defiance of our friend 
Thompson, that it may have achieved a certain degree 
of success in its operations. ‘ What! ’ he answers with 
a dash of indignation, 4 does not Mr. Grumblebelly, of 
Bethesda Chapel, say it is a failure ? Does not the 
Times assert that it is a failure ? Does not the Rev. 
Augustus Whimper, the High Church clergyman, 
declare, with a zephyr-like sigh from his double- 
breasted, that it is a failure ? Does not the Rev. Zede- 
kiah Growler, the Low Church minister, admit, with 
the whites of his eyes, that it is a failure ? Does not 
the Radical member for Ginghambury pronounce it 
from the Rustings to be a failure ? Does not the Tory 
member for Fuddleton confess to the Dissenters of the 
borough that it is a failure ? What would you have ? 
Hav6 you no faith in great names ? ’ And thus this 
poor old Church of England, which for so many cen¬ 
turies has stood its ground, is treated with a mixture of 
scorn and pity by these miserable Grumblebellies, and 
Whimpers, and Growlers, and kicked aside like a toad¬ 
stool which sprung up the night before. Charles Lamb, 
h 2 


100 


OUR FAILURES. 


entertaining Elliston at dinner, apologized for his humble 
fare ;— 1 observing,’ he says, 1 that for my own part I 
never ate but one thing at dinner. “ I too never eat 
but one thing at dinner,” was Elliston’s reply: then, 
after a pause—“ reckoning fish as nothing.” The 
manner was all. It was as if by a peremptory sentence 
he had decreed the annihilation of all the savoury escu¬ 
lents which the pleasant and nutritious food-giving 
ocean pours forth upon poor humans from her watery 
bosom.’* And precisely with the same imperial dignity 
and indifference now-a-days are mighty institutions 
ignored with a wave of the hand, and that too by men 
whom we are ourselves accustomed to regard as very 
ordinary commonplace mortals indeed. 

It is marvellous what an effect a broad statement, 
confidently made, and rounded off with an epigram, 
has upon unthinking people. We forget whether Arch¬ 
bishop Whately has classed this among his category of 
fallacies, but it is about the commonest one of our day. 
An assertion, altogether inaccurate, is so confidently 
made, that many take it for granted, and argue from it 
as an axiom. Examine the popular controversies of the 
time, and you will see how extensively this fallacy is 
employed. Some project is started: however much 
has been effected in the same line before, it is ignored; 
all previous efforts have been failures; they are pooh- 
poohed as though they were a little smoke evaporating 
before the puff of the orator. It was such a fallacy 


* Ellistoniana —Essays of Elia. 


OUR FAILURES . 


101 


which Charles II., in a merry mood, practised on the 
members of the Royal Society, in the question of the 
fish and the vase of water. Paley had an awkward way 
of dealing with this kind of deception. The solution 
of the problem was expressed in his broad Cumberland 
dialect, and without any circumlocution :— 1 It’s a loy !’ 

Thus, chatterers start out with the assertion that the 
Church of England is a failure. But is this correct ? 
If we have eyes and ears, and ordinary human faculties, 
we venture to declare such a statement to be not simply 
untrue, but the very opposite of the truth. If the 
increase of churches, of clergymen, and of schools, 
extending even to every corner of our land, be any 
indication of vitality, we know not where you can go 
without knocking your head against such stubborn 
facts. If the confession of opponents be any evidence 
of the Church’s prosperity, we might appeal to the 
admissions of Dissenters for a testimony. But we should 
despair of convincing our Whimpers and Growlers and 
Grumblebellies that their foregone conclusion is against 
evidence. 1 The clergy are a set of drones,’ says some 
censor from his secret place, himself probably a clergy¬ 
man put in quarantine by his brethren. Then we 
inquire,—Where are the workers ? for except among 
Church ministers we see but few. 1 The Church of 
England has no hold upon the affections of the people,’ 
declares some pompous fellow, who is never seen within 
any place of worship at all. Then who, or what, we 
are bold to ask, has a hold on these affections? We 
greatly fear that they , are running sadly to seed if this 


102 


OUR FAILURES. 


be the case, for we do not see that any other denomina¬ 
tion has an especial hold on them. We admit that a 
considerable portion of our people belongs to one or 
other of the numberless dissenting sects that are scattered 
over our land. And why not ? So long as the world 
lasts there must be minds fashioned in the mould of 
dissent. Nor is this altogether undesirable : opposition 
alone can stimulate and irritate our Establishment into 
watchfulness and energy. However beautiful is the 
ideal of a universal Church untouched by external assault 
and unshaken by internal division, the history of Chris¬ 
tianity proves to us that if such a fair edifice could be 
erected, it would after a time crumble away from its 
own mouldering materials and its inherent insufficiency 
of self-restoration. You might make it beautiful in a 
picture : you could not endow it with those self-repairing 
energies which living bodies inherit. But be this as it 
may, you cannot evade the plain fact that the Church 
of England is now doing her work well, and that she 
has a firmer hold upon the great mass of the people 
than ever she had before, and is yearly extending her 
influence, notwithstanding the Growlers within and the 
Grumblebellies without her pale. 

We should be extremely obliged to any one of these 
Growlers or Grumblebellies, if he would suggest to us 
any agency besides that of the National Church, to 
which we are to look for the social and moral ameliora¬ 
tion of our people. This triumph is not to be achieved 
by spasmodic and occasional rushes: it can only be 
wrought out by continued and systematic effort. 


OUR FAILURES. 


103 


Guerilla assaults on irreligion must go for what they 
are worth; hut while we have heard much of their 
effects, we have seen but little for permanent good. 
Revivals create excitement of a certain kind for a season; 
but whatever flame they produce, appears soon to die 
away again, and to leave only its residuum of ashes. 
Special services are sometimes tried ; but they can 
hardly be said to reach the class which all desire to gain. 
The conversion of theatres and concert halls into 
periodical preaching-rooms can produce no enduring 
change upon the lowest of our people : they serve rather 
to exalt the names of the orators than the morals of the 
immoral. We have listened to open-air preachers, and 
watched the people that came up and passed away ; but 
we have fancied that they must often leave the scene 
not very favourably impressed with the rule of life as 
there inculcated or the motives held out for embracing 
it. Certain erratic geniuses have adopted a comic style 
of sermon, just infusing a dash of the religious element 
into the pleasantries and grimaces of a minor theatre; 
but with these we have the least possible patience. 
Give us the comicality whole, or the devotion whole: 
the two will not amalgamate. Besides, this mixture 
of neutralistic ingredients argues great irreverence on 
the*part of the compounder, and must instil almost as 
sad a spirit of irreverence into those who imbibe it. 
Another agency has been exerted of late years by a class 
of persons from the humble ranks of life, who claim the 
title of converted. Thus, converted colliers, converted 
stonemasons, converted weavers, converted prizefighters, 


104 


OUR FAILURES. 


occasionally visit our towns, engage large buildings, and 
preach for awhile, often to crowded audiences. The 
biographies of the men are circulated, and the number 
of conversions they have wrought is paraded. We 
have seen but little of these itinerants, and therefore 
cannot speak positively about them; but we should be 
very cautious in accepting either the description of their 
moral change or the statistics of conversions they have 
effected. All the foregoing agencies may be classed 
under the head of the fitful and sensational; and without 
denying altogether that some good may result from them, 
we are very sure that permanent benefits can only have 
their rise and increase in a permanent system.* 

We are by no means disposed to hold up the Church 
of England as perfect in her organization and agency. 
In the opinions entertained by our clergy—ranging 
from Romanism to Supralapsarianism, from Supralap- 
sarianism to Primitive Methodism, from Primitive 
Methodism to Presbyterianism, from Presbyterianism 

* [In promoting the moral welfare of our poorer brethren, the 
Nonconformists have doubtless done their share. They are 
frequently zealous and effectual in their action within a given 
circle. Only let them confine themselves to their legitimate 
sphere of duty, and not trouble themselves about pulling down 
the Church of England, without setting anything up in its stead, 
and their religious influence will be strikingly felt upon certain 
classes of our population. When, however, they seek to ‘ liberate ’ 
those who stand in no need of their ‘ liberation,’ they lay them¬ 
selves open to the charge of acting on the dog-in-the-manger 
principle : at the best, they become but so many cackling geese 
by the pond-side, or braying donkeys on the common.— 1866 .] 


OUR FAILURES. 


105 


toUnitarianism, from Unitarianism to Anythingarianism 
—we think there is a latitude so wide that dogmas 
become doubts, and the power of truth is lost in its 
expansion. We would not fetter opinion unduly ; but 
it should be made to revolve within certain limits, es¬ 
pecially since our clergy pledge themselves to Articles, 
Formularies, and Creeds, in their natural sense. Of 
our Establishment in its financial position we can say 
but little in commendation, seeing that income and 
work among its clergy are mostly in an inverse ratio. 
If, in our humble station, we had some talismanic power 
of moulding and re-moulding with a wish, we have a 
strong suspicion that we should become ecclesiastical 
reformers of a very advanced kind. With what pleasure 
should we roll up and re-distribute the large and mis¬ 
managed property of our Church, believing that if 
rightly settled and arranged it would be enough to 
satisfy much of our financial wants! What havoc 
should we make of fines, premiums, leases, and such¬ 
like abominations ! With how much satisfaction should 
we make those tenants of Sleepy Hollow, called Eccle¬ 
siastical Commissioners, open their eyes ! We should be 
a stern Wycliffe in enforcing our reforms, feeling assured 
that no institution, however noble and time-honoured, 
can be on a safe basis, in which some of its ministers 
starve on fifty pounds a year, and others, in no way their 
superiors by birth or education or gifts, luxuriate on 
many thousands. Had we the enchanter’s wand, we 
fear that we should create astonishment and dismay 
among dignitaries who dwell under cedar roofs. It 


106 


OUR FAILURES. 


might seem to be a sad thing for a man who sleeps in a 
palace of Puginian Gothic, to wake up and find himself 
in a plain brick mansion with stone facings; it might 
be a melancholy sight for a gouty D.D. who rides in a 
gilded chariot, to have to scramble into a one-horse 
buggy; it might be a disastrous change for a pompous 
ecclesiastic, who is attended by many servants, to come 
down to a single man in livery or a tidy housemaid : 
but, if we had Prospero’s staff, we should ‘ file our 
mind ’ to work out such a metamorphosis. We should 
close our eyes and harden our hearts to the tears and 
prayers even of the wives and daughters of our digni¬ 
taries ; nay, we are not sure whether we should not 
reduce them at once from their musical criticisms and 
Kegent-street millinery to making puddings and mending 
stockings. We are far from wishing a general levelling 
of position and income; but no one can contemplate the 
present state of our Church, without a conviction that 
its inequalities of rank, of wealth, and of power, are too 
great to be maintained for another half-century.* 

* [The Ecclesiastical Commissioners, we are happy to write, 
have latterly awoke after their somewhat long slumber, not, 
however, before there was a somewhat loud knocking at their 
door, and a vigorous pulling at their bell. Be that however as it 
may, their decision to raise every living where the population is 
over 6000 to 300/. a year, has lightened many a weary heart and 
dispelled many a gloomy apprehension in our manufacturing 
districts. Still, very much remains to be done, before our 
ecclesiastical system can be satisfactory. The difficulty of the 
present day is, to obtain suitable candidates for the ministerial 
work, to meet even with curates at all for our populous districts. 


OUR FAILURES. 


107 


Not inappropriate to this subject, we lately heard a 
pleasant tale, for the truth of which, however, we do 

Now, while we admit that this hesitation to enter Holy Orders 
seems to cast a shadow on the future of our Church, we cannot 
be altogether surprised at it, however we may regret it. Compare 
a clergyman in his position and prospects with a layman of his 
own rank. Few are bound to occupations more trying than one 
engaged in ministerial duties, not so much perhaps from the 
amount of toil they impose as from the continued distractions 
they entail. The clerk, or the shopman, or the schoolmaster 
knows the hour when his day’s labour ends ; he may spend his 
evening in the quiet of his family circle, or employ it in congenial 
pursuits. But a clergyman in a populous parish is not so 
fortunate. The merchant or tradesman is encouraged to much 
effort by a sense that his transactions generally tend to improve 
his position, and to provide for his family ; every year’s round of 
duties leaves him a step higher on the social'ladder; he can look 
back over a track made luminous by the glitter of an increasing 
prosperity, and forward with a reasonable hope to advancing 
success. But with the clergyman it is different; he has no such 
incentive; he must work simply with the unselfish object of 
doing good to others; and though we are far from saying that 
this is not a noble stimulus to exertion, it can only be felt in 
proportion as the earthly part of our nature becomes sublimated, 
—a process easier for platform orators to dilate on than for the 
spiritual combatant to achieve. The man who pursues a course 
of study or devotes himself to a literary life has the prospect 
of distinction" and fame, if not of profit. But the working 
clergyman cannot hope even for that recompense: he is but 
little known beyond his own district. Can we then wonder much 
that our most intellectual graduates of Oxford and Cambridge 
hesitate to take Holy Orders at the present time ? The general 
disturbance in religious faith, which like a rumbling volcano is 
now agitating our Church—temporarily, we believe—casting up 
its distorted and incongruous fragments, from the decaying 


108 


OUR FAILURES. 


not implicitly vouch. One of our leading prelates not 
long ago invited to his hospitable mansion in London a 
country rector, an old friend, from one of the remote 
provinces. The simple-minded gentleman came about 
five o’clock, having a notion that he should arrive about 


superstitions of Father Ignatius to the stony scepticisms of 
Bishop Colenso,—this shaking of creeds may have some effect in 
deterring men from the ministry. Civil offices, too, now thrown 
open largely to competition, may attract some who would other¬ 
wise have sought Ordination. But we apprehend that a far more 
prevailing cause of the defection is to be found in the uncertain 
prospect that the Church offers to her clergy. A graduate of 
ability in the present day has many openings, along which he 
may, humanly speaking, expect to attain to wealth or dis¬ 
tinction, after a period of diligence and patient watching. But 
the same young man, once admitted to Holy Orders, without 
private patronage, and without those rude materials of mind and 
heart out of which popularity is mostly hewn, may spend his 
whole life ceaselessly treading the wheel, but never ascending a 
step. "We are thus in danger of seeing the intellect of our age 
eliminated from the clerical profession. An incumbent without 
attainments may receive from his position as much as he could 
have contrived to make in a secular occupation: it is the clearer 
heads and stronger wills that have to suffer: it is the clearer 
heads and stronger wills that we especially want at this time. 
"We should be delighted if our lawgivers could devise some 
comprehensive plan whereby a gradation in the ministry could 
be effected according to merit and years of service: we greatly 
fear that unless this difficulty and relative ones be encountered 
by the heads of our Church or our Governments, there may 
come sooner or later—it may not be in the present century—a 
surging tide of popular opinion, perhaps prejudice, over our 

Establishment, which may shake the fabric to its very base._ 

1866 .] 


OUR FAILURES . 


109 


tlie dinner hour. Soon after he had taken his seat, tea 
was brought round. ‘ Well,’ thought the rector, 1 this 
is bare living, at any rate ; if I had known, I would have 
had a beefsteak at a chop-house before I came; but I 
hardly expected a bishop would dine at one o’clock. 
Is it a fast-day, I wonder ? ’ He drank his tea however, 
and said nothing. About half-past seven o’clock his 
bed-candle was placed in his hand, and he w r as con¬ 
ducted to his sleeping-room. ‘ Call you this London ?’ 
he soliloquized; ‘ why, I should have fared far better 
at Silverton; I should have had my comfortable 
mutton-chop and my glass of beer at nine o’olock, and 
I should have been in bed at ten, well fed and contented. 
But here I am, half-starved in the midst of splendour 

_as hungry as a hunter, as hollow as a drum—and 

where everything looks so grand. Well, fine furniture 
won’t make a man fat; give me substantial victuals and 
you may take the gilding.’ Soliloquizing in this fashion 
he undressed himself, pulled over his ears his cotton 
nightcap, * with a tassel on the top,’ as the song says, 
and crept into bed, coiling himself up comfortably; and 
being of a forgiving temper he soon forgot his troubles, 
and sank into his first sleep as sweetly as a ‘ christom 
child ; ’ when lo ! after a while, bells begin to ring, and 
a smart knock at his door resounds through his room, 
and a voice is heard saying, ‘ Dinner is on the table, sir !’ 
The old gentleman awoke in considerable confusion, not 
knowing whether it was to-day or to-morrow; and accord¬ 
ing to the most authentic account he appeared shortly 
after at the dinner-table, though in a somewhat ruffled 


110 


OUR FAILURES. 


condition as related to his wardrobe, and mentally in a 
daze of uncertainty as to the day of the week and the 
meal he was eating. 

The Parochial System. 

1 ButsuYely you will admit that our parochial system is 
a failure V 1 Why should we admit it ? ’ 1 Well, then, 

is it not allowed to be so on all sides ? Are not good 
and energetic men, clergymen with large preaching 
powers, ready to break down its hedges and pull down 
its strongholds, as things, to use their mode of ex¬ 
pression, worn-out and used-up ? ’ ‘ Yes ; but are we 

necessarily to pin our faith to the coat-skirts of these 
powerful preachers ? Because a few erratic clergymen 
and semi-dissenting laymen desire to uproot landmarks 
and remove boundaries that have existed from the remo¬ 
test period of our history, is that any reason why we 
should do the same ? Indeed, if it were worth our 
while, we should be very much inclined to dispute the 
discretion and the preaching powers of the persons whose 
opinions you quote.’ ‘ But do not others say the same 
—good thoughtful Churchmen—practical, hard-headed 
men of business ? ’ * They may; but assuredly it has 

never fallen to our lot to hear sound thinkers thus 
express themselves. We have listened with some 
amusement to occasional chatterboxes exercising their 
tongues in an idle gallop on such a topic; but we have 
never yet met with a thoughtful, benevolent, dispas¬ 
sionate member of our Church who would advise the 
eradication of our parochial system.’ 


OUR FAILURES. 


Ill 


Then, what would these reformers substitute in its 
stead ? for its destruction must be followed by a con¬ 
struction of some sort. Of course diocesan boundaries 
must be broken up as well as those of the parish; and 
we may perhaps live to see Durham heading a raid 
against Carlisle, as in the ancient days of Border warfare. 
Let not the heads of our Church ever suppose that in 
breaking up the old parochial system, the Episcopal 
status will remain unshaken. But what arrangement 
must be made in lieu of our ancient parishes ? How 
are we to employ our twenty thousand clergymen? 
Must we have an Ecclesiastical Commander-in-chief, 
who will appoint his subordinate officers in their several 
gradations, and distribute his forces as they may seem 
most needed ? Will he send flying columns of preachers 
through the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ire¬ 
land, as Lord Clyde would order his flying columns to 
scour the broad plains of India ? Observe, a clergyman’s 
duty does not consist entirely of preaching ; probably a 
thoughtful mind might find out many other offices as 
belonging to him, quite as necessary though less osten¬ 
tatious. If he is to be the pastor of a parish, he must 
superintend his flock and minister to their wants, not 
only on Sunday, but every day. Will preaching in a 
churoh or public building find out the needy, the care¬ 
less, and the ignorant ? Will it gather the young into 
our schools? Will it comfort those who are lying in 
sickness at their homes? Will it lend wings to the 
fainting spirit as it quits the dissolving tabernacle in 
which it has sojourned so long ? And yet these are cares 


112 


OUR FAILURES. 


which devolve on every clergyman, if he intends to do 
his appointed work within his parochial limits. While 
the mere preacher is a celebrated character, passing an 
agreeable life, entertained by .the wealthy, and laurel- 
crowned at sentimental tea-parties, the pastor who is 
1 ready with all faithful diligence ’ to fulfil the daily 
duties of his office, is frequently unknown to fame, 
scantily paid, and but little recognised in his self-denying 
labours. 

The ecclesiastical events of the last twelve months 
have brought the subject of parochial limits into pro¬ 
minent notice. This question has caused a very insensate 
cry, as though it involved a controversy between the 
high and the low sections of the Church ; whereas, so far 
as we can discern, it has no bearing whatever upon the 
distinctive principles and opinions of these parties. Be 
the truth fairly told,—it is simply a question between 
Episcopal encroachment and Incumbental rights. If 
the Low Church clergy will come up like unsuspecting 
sheep to the slaughter, they may do so, and welcome; 
it is not for us to complain; but while we admire the 
harmlessness of the dove which characterises them, we 
cannot say that they combine with it the wisdom of the 
serpent. And here, be it observed, we have no feeling 
but a favourable one towards our bishops personally. 
We have been slightly acquainted with some, and never 
had a word of difference with any of them. We respect 
them as being men of Christian feeling, and for the most 
part of high intellectual cultivation. We admit that, 
in their position, we should endeavour to retain the 


OUR FAILURES . 


113 


power we had; nay, a fatal temptation might perchance 
seduce us to seek the increase of this authority. Still, 
that does not alter the abstract justice of the case. And 
lately this evil angel of temptation, this lying spirit, 
has presented itself to the Episcopal bench, appealing 
to that lust of power which more than any other motive- 
cause has shaken dynasties and institutions. Let every 
rector, vicar and perpetual curate in our land, keep in 
mind the late burglarious attempt to break into their 
premises by hoisting, under the cover of the law, some 
clever cracksman over their walls. Let every incum¬ 
bent give a moment’s reflection to the whole proceedings 
in connexion with the late notorious measure, entitled 
the ‘ Religious Worship Act Amendment Bill,’ and if 
he still remain indifferent about the matter, we would 
congratulate him on the negative comfort he enjoys 
from a very stolid obtuseness. The Bill, modified 
indeed from its original deformity, passed through the 
House of Lords with the full, entire, and universal con¬ 
currence of the Bench of Bishops ; nor do we remember 
that the slightest opposition to it was raised by any 
temporal peer. It passed its first and second readings 
in the House of Commons without any remonstrance 
from the clergy, and, so far as we saw from the parlia¬ 
mentary reports, without a single observation, favourable 
or unfavourable, from any one of Her Majesty’s faithful 
Commons. Then came the most comical part of the 
play : the Bill dropped, nobody knew how or why. 
We now gather from a conversation among a few of 
the Lords, that the promoter of the measure in the House 
VOL. II. I 


114 


OUR FAILURES. 


of Commons had been told that it was 1 too bad ; ’ and 
thus we find that a Bill which had passed the Lords 
and two readings in the Commons in silence, as too 
trivial to call for a remark, was really so shameful in its 
principle that a ten minutes’ speech from a fourth-rate 
member could have upset it. The truth is, it was an 
appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober; and so when 
two or three sanguine men woke up from the intoxica¬ 
tion of religious excitement, and began to consult their 
less impulsive friends, the measure seemed to all parties 
to be so despotic and unjust that from its own inherent 
rottenness it was shovelled out of the House by a back 
door, and cast into the ash-pit.* 

But let no one suppose that we would maintain in¬ 
violate our parishes as they now stand. We defend 
the principle of the parochial system, but the parishes 
themselves we would carve out into numerous divisions 
and subdivisions. We would carry out the Marquis of 
Blandford’s Act to the fullest extent, and break up at once 

[* The circumstances which prompted the above remarks may 
not now be generally remembered. When the Exeter Hall 
Services were interdicted—very injudiciously, we think—by the 
incumbent of the parish in which it was situated, a Bill was 
brought into the House of Lords which was intended to give to 
the Bishops in their respective dioceses the power of overriding 
the authority of the Beneficed Clergy in their several parishes, 
and of sending preachers whenever and wherever they thought 
fit. It was an ex post facto measure, emanating from bitterness 
and disappointment of spirit, and dictated by a pettiness of self- 
will and a despotism of purpose such as now-a-days are rarely 
exhibited in either House of Parliament.— 1866 .] 


OUR FAILURES. 


115 


those lumbering ecclesiastical districts that have grown 
into an unwieldy plethora. We would build fresh 
churches on spots where they were really required, 
taking care that each was fairly endowed, and had good 
and gratuitous accommodation for the poor. Indeed, we 
would go further. In many of our large parishes the 
population has increased enormously within a century, 
and from the advanced value of the land attached to 
the benefice the income has been greatly augmented, 
while the district churches and chapels-of-ease in the 
parish have continued on their scant allowance, and 
have gone on paying a considerable portion of their fees 
to the mother or step-mother church. Now, on the 
avoidance of the vicar, by death or otherwise, we would 
distribute certain slices of the fat living to sundry lean 
incumbents within the parochial limits, and make at 
once each district a separate parish for all ecclesias¬ 
tical purposes whatever. Thus, we would be continually 
adapting and remodelling our ancient parochial land¬ 
marks according to change of circumstances and increase 
of population; but we should consider a man a very ap¬ 
propriate inmate of Bedlam who would think of casting 
down these boundary fences on the impulse of some 
preaching aestrum.* 

* It is very likely that the opponents of the parochial system 
may say,—We desire to see it, not entirely obliterated—but only 
reformed. For our own part we should be glad to hear, when 
their plans have become a little more matured, what are their 
definite views; for we have not yet been able to learn them. 


116 


OUR FAILURES. 


Preaching in the Church of England. 

This brings us to another supposed great Failure in 
our Church system, namely— Preaching. And here we 
know not exactly how to deal with the question ; for, on 
the one hand, our clergymen are called upon to go forth 
as preachers over the length and breadth of our nation, 
and, on the other, they are told somewhat summarily 
that they had better shut up altogether in that line of 
duty, inasmuch as their preaching is a total failure. 
Here the clerical body runs the hazard of being crushed 
between two contradictory assertions, as the vessel is 
sometimes crushed to atoms between clashing icebergs. 
Indeed, we have often considered the clergy to be about 
the most cruelly used beings in the wide world: if the 
negroes with black skins claim the overflowing sympathy 
of our philanthropists, we think that the negroes in black 
coats ought to share in this exuberance of pity. Look at 
that poor fellow—you will not treat him with a few 
halfpence, you say; but why give him kicks into the 
bargain ? Is not the negative evil enough without the 
positive? Is it not villanous treatment to be abused on 
an empty stomach? Give the pitiable creature a meal’s 
meat, and then attack him. Besides, every cur fancies! 
that he has a call to yelp and snap at him. Is not the 
barking stomach—the latrans stomachus of Horace— 
quite enough, without the barking of a troublesome 
whelp at a man’s heels? And who are they whose cries 
are the loudest against the clergy on the matter of 


OUR FAILURES. 


117 


preaching? Are they those who are actuated by the 
true spirit of Christianity, living in the belief and prac¬ 
tice of Gospel truths? Nothing of the kind. There 
is Mr. Smug, the noisy greengrocer, whose religion is a 
mixture of wild excitement on Sundays and very du¬ 
bious dealings on week-days; he declares that he can¬ 
not profit by Mr. Smoothleigh’s sermons. Then there 
is Mr. Doublethong, F.S.A., &c., &c., the newspaper 
editor of literary eminence, whose heart is as dead and 
cold and hard as granite : he sets poor Mr. Smoothleigh 
at nought, and, if he attends a place of worship at all, 
prefers, as an antidote to his week’s weary labours, the 
lively sallies of the Rev. James Crow. And so on 
might we individualise. We admit indeed that a main 
object of preaching is to rouse the callous and torpid 
heart; but it is somewhat too much for Mr. Smoothleigh 
to be jeered at by a man who hardens his heart most 
resolutely as he comes to church, and goes away com¬ 
plaining, ‘ You won’t convert me ! ’ 

Let us consider the matter fairly, neither extenuating 
the faults of our preachers nor claiming undue merit 
for them. What, then, do you look for ? You are not 
sanguine enough, surely, to expect that every clergy¬ 
man can become eminent in the pulpit? You do not 
find that every pleader at the bar is a fluent orator, or 
every member of the House of Commons a graceful 
speaker. Nay, if you analyse a batch of cabinet minis¬ 
ters, all of whom may be supposed to possess certain 
qualifications for their office, you will find that there are 
great inequalities in their several endowments. Indeed, 


118 


OUR FAILURES. 


we will give you the range of the wide world, and we 
think you would be puzzled to find any class of men 
whatever the members of which are of equal excellence 
in any particular accomplishment. And why look for 
this dead level among preachers ? Nay, we will go fur¬ 
ther, and be bold enough to express our doubts whether 
it wo aid promote the interests of religion generally if 
every clergyman had this accomplishment in great per¬ 
fection. In the apostles’ days there were 4 diversities 
of gifts,’ and wisely was it so ordained. Your popular 
preacher is very rarely a quiet worker in a parish, from 
the demands upon his time elsewhere; and we have 
seen that other duties no less essential than those of the 
pulpit are expected of the pastor. 

‘ But look at dissenting preachers, ’ some one says. 
< Very well, look at dissenting preachers,’ we reply, 4 and 
what do you find? You will not discover that their 
success is greater than that of Church ministers.’ We 
are often amused with the confident manner in which 
gentlemen of a dissatisfied disposition talk in exaltation 
of nonconformist preachers, Avhile judicious dissenters 
themselves repudiate all such superiority; nay, we have 
ourselves heard them lament that in this particular the 
Church is taking the lead of them in their very strong¬ 
holds. There are doubtless some superior orators among 
the nonconformists, and these are so placed as to give 
them considerable prominence ; but to talk of the large 
body of their preachers as peculiarly gifted is simply 
preposterous. They serve their purpose, and we wish 
them God-speed; but we would ask the man who mos 


OUR FAILURES. 


119 


feelingly enjoys his grumble, whether he sincerely wishes 
the clergy to become imitators of dissenting preachers in 
manner, style, and matter. 

We are far from wishing to be the apologist of those 
clergymen who are too idle or too indifferent to improve 
themselves in the art of either reading or preaching: 
they are bound to cultivate their natural gifts as highly as 
possible, that they may bring before their hearers the 
truths of the gospel in the most attractive and forcible 
manner. Nay, so far from being their champion, we 
would teach them a sharp practical lesson as touching 
this matter, were it in our power to do so. We have 
no patience with your clerical drone, whether he be 
found in town or country: indeed, we have a thorough 
contempt for any man, whether he be cobbler or curate, 
peer or pork-butcher, who is not anxious to do his 
duty, like an honest and a conscientious worker, in that 
state of life to which it has pleased Providence to call 
him. But what we fear is, that this love of sensational 
harangues may lead some of our weaker clerical brethren 
into a false taste and a coarse style in their pulpit ad¬ 
dresses. Preaching is not intrinsically good, because it 
may attract a crowd for a time; nay, the probabilities 
are that such a style is essentially bad. A fleeting 
popularity may be gained by clap-traps and vulgarities 
which tend to debase the tone of mind and behaviour 
in a congregation ; but a clergyman who has any self- 
respect will rise above such weaknesses: he will remem¬ 
ber, whether he be surrounded by a congregation of 
rustics or mechanics, by a class of wealthy or scientific 


120 


OUR FAILURES. 


men, that he is placed there as in some degree a literary 
as well as a religious guide, as a leader of good man¬ 
ners and gentlemanly bearing as well as a teacher of 
sound doctrine and a pattern of Christian practice. 
His office, rightly understood, is to raise the un¬ 
learned up to his level rather than to lower himself to 
theirs. 

The question of training for the ministry is a very 
important one, and has certainly been too much over¬ 
looked. We are often shocked at the utter inexperience 
in elocution with which many curates enter on their 
ministerial office. The dissenters at their institutions 
are too wise to pass over this essential department of 
training. And yet our Church most culpably looks on, 
while there is this palpable staring blank in her system. 
Even those colleges which were established for the pur¬ 
pose of giving a cheap access to clerical orders, and 
which might easily make practice in elocution a part of 
their curriculum, either almost or altogether neglect 
this manifest duty. Might not also the Professors of 
Pastoral Theology and the Divinity Lecturers at our 
ancient Universities give their attention to this subject 
with great effect ? As it is, many a young man, even if 
sufficiently prepared in biblical and classical learning^ 
enters the desk with less capability of reading than a 
mechanic in a Mutual Improvement Society, and seems 
to luxuriate in mangling our beautiful Service with the 
zest of a reckless anatomist, and produces effects so 
deliberately fatal that, if even a merciful jury were to 
sit on the performance, they would be compelled to 


OUR FAILURES. 


121 


return a verdict of 1 wilful murder.’ And the mischief 
is still more perceptible in preaching. What possible 
effect, except a ludicrous one, can a sermon produce on 
a congregation when it is pumped out, or droned out, or 
snivelled out, or mouthed out, as though by some self¬ 
acting apparatus, disconnected with mind, heart, and 
taste ? Too much, doubtless, has been written on the 
dreariness and insipidity of sermons ; but when there is 
a just cause of complaint, it springs more from the un¬ 
natural, distorted manner in which the address is de¬ 
livered, than from any deficiency or inefficiency in its 
subject-matter. Now for this, we conceive, there is a 
practical remedy at hand: it rests with the Bishops and 
their Examining Chaplains. We would make both 
reading and preaching a strict test of fitness for the 
ministry; we would require each candidate for Holy 
Orders to pass, not through' a few minutes of oratorical 
exercise, but through a lengthened and stringent ordeal; 
and whoever was found to have been too idle to acquire 
a fair degree of elocutionary proficiency, we would 
resolutely reject him till he had better prepared himself. 
This is an acquirement which to a certain extent is 
within the reach of all who have no lingual malforma¬ 
tion, and it ought to be made a sine qua non. We are 
no admirer of the six lessons’ system : in passing through 
the manipulations of a quack, you are likely to come 
out one. Any candidate for ordination, however, not 
physically incapacitated, who sincerely devotes himselt 
to the attainment of a good elocutionary style under 
judicious guidance, may reach without fail a certain 


122 


OUR FAILURES. 


standard of respectability in the performance of his 
public ministrations.* 

If, moreover, we could prevail on our clergy to study 
and practise the art of elocution, that much discussed 
problem on the comparative merits of extemporaneous 
and written sermons would be virtually solved. The 
distinctive characteristic of an address from the pulpit 
consists more in its style of enunciation than in its 
subject-matter; and if preachers have only disciplined 
themselves to deliver their discourses naturally, grace¬ 
fully, feelingly, and effectively, it matters little whether 
they do so with the manuscript before them or not. 

The term extemporaneous in itself involves a fallacy 
or a misconception. If a pulpit discourse be really ex¬ 
temporaneous, or approximately so, it will necessarily 
be very tedious and unsatisfactory. It may be fit for 
a Sunday School, or week-day evening lecture, or an 
assemblage made up of those who, being neither very 
critical nor refined, are best pleased with the rough-and- 
ready style ; but to a mixed congregation, that loose 
and unprepared mode of preaching is, so far as our 
judgment goes, about the worst that can be adopted. 
It consists of a series of texts and common-places in 
confused sequence — 1 orient pearls at random strung ’— 

[* There is both wit and wisdom in the scene from «Punch.’ 
(We quote from memory.) Bishop Punch—Now, sir, go on; let 
me hear you read some portion of the Service. Candidate for 

Holy Orders—I publish the Banns of maw-widge-. Bishop 

Punch—Stop, sir, stop ; that will do. You had better, sir, take 
orders in the commercial fine.— 1866 .] 


OUR FAILURES. 


123 


dealt out sometimes in a drone, sometimes with gesticu¬ 
lations, always after a slip-shod fashion. This style is 
endurable as you hear it occasionally at the bar, or on 
the platform, or on the hustings; but in such cases you 
make up your mind to listen to a speech, and you come 
away and think no more about it. Sermons, however, 
recur twice every Sunday, where the time is of value, 
and the subject-matter is old and well-beaten. In order 
to fulfil the condition of brevity and point, the most 
seasoned orator requires considerable preparation. The 
difficulty does not consist in spreading words over an 
hour, but in condensing them into five-and-twenty 
minutes, and moulding them into order and terseness of 
diction. This is observable in the most practised 
speakers. The feeling, for instance, with which an in¬ 
telligent visitor to the House of Commons leaves the 
assembly there is unquestionably, that one-half their 
time at least is wasted in stringing together needless 
sentences and running into a waste of verbiage. 

In comparing the two styles of preaching, as practised 
with and without the manuscript, we must be careful 
not to place the best of the one against the worst of the 
other. On estimating their relative merits, we irfay 
eliminate the most objectionable of each. The sermon 
read through in an unnatural, monotonous, school-boy 
drawl, with the nose ever pointing at the manuscript, 
without the slightest correspondence between the senti¬ 
ment and the enunciation, with much less feeling than 
the preacher would exhibit in purchasing a new hat, 
this pulpit exercise may be placed on an equality with 


124 


OUR FAILURES. 


an extemporaneous discourse spun out of platitudes 
into an infinitesimal tenuity with the skill of a glass- 
worker, or spread thinly out of small talk about self 
and apocryphal anecdotes over a large surface with a 
goldbeater’s perseverance, delivered perhaps with a 
dropping -fire of words and a hesitancy as if each 
syllable were to be the last, or, it may be, with a fluency 
so volatile that all ideas evaporate in the out-pouring,— 
a discourse wherein the speaker never knows when or 
how to leave off, like an unlucky aeronaut who cannot 
satisfy himself about a landing-place,—a discourse that 
seems often to be moving in a perpetual circle, reminding 
one of skimmed milk revolving by an easy but unceasing 
centrifugal force round the inside of a basin. The 
relative merits of these two styles may be left undecided, 
but we would advise every one who has the self-confi¬ 
dence to ascend the stair of the pulpit to aim at some¬ 
thing higher and better than either. The most attrac¬ 
tive method, we apprehend, is that which dispenses 
with the manuscript: it allows of more freedom in 
action, and seems to spring more directly from the 
inspiration of the mind and the warmth of the heart: 
only the matter must be prepared with all but the 
accuracy of a written discourse. This practice involves 
much exact composition and a severe pressure on the 
memory ; it generally keeps the mind in an uneasy sus¬ 
pense, and the nerves in a state of teasing irritability, even 
during the liturgical service ; but it is very striking and 
effective when the preacher is gifted with commanding 
powers of elocution. We should ourselves, however, be 


■OUR FAILURES. 


125 


quite content with a sermon delivered from the manu¬ 
script if only the preacher had duly schooled himself 
for his part. We will assume that his elocutionary 
faculty has been cultivated and his matter carefully pre¬ 
pared : he may so accustom himself to the art of 
delivery as to preach with all the action and freedom of 
an extemporaneous discourse,—with almost all its vivid 
expression of feeling, and with somewhat more than its 
exactitude of diction,—with every becoming variation 
of intonation and manner, and with a sure aim at the 
individual conscience; indeed, as an illustration of this, 
we need only point to some of the very best preachers 
of our day. We certainly give the first rank in pulpit, 
oratory to him who prepares so accurately as not to re¬ 
quire a manuscript before him at all; but such a one 
must keep much to his library : if he has to preach 
twice on the Sunday, he cannot entangle himself in 
parochial work. We place next the graceful preacher 
from the manuscript. Of that humdrum style where the 
sermon is merely read, and with a stammering difficulty, 
we can only speak with regret; we place it side by side 
with the extemporaneous wishy-washy, and you may 
take your choice. This precept may be usefully kept 
in mind :—If your sermon be delivered without manu¬ 
script, let it have all the accuracy of a written one; if 
it be a written one before you, let your delivery have 
all the freedom of an extemporaneous address. 

But whatever may be the clergyman’s practice when 
preaching to a mixed congregation, it is most essential 
to his influence and comfort that he be able to deliver 


126 


OUR FAILURES . 


an extemporaneous speech with confidence and fluency: 
indeed, unless he can do that, his style of address from 
manuscript will ever want freedom and ease. In the 
manufacturing districts many of the working class 
acquire a certain facility in making speeches. Teachers 
in Sunday schools, members of Mutual Improvement 
Societies, aspiring young men in Mechanics’ Institutes, 
strive after the faculty of ready-speaking ; and a clergy¬ 
man must not certainly follow behind his people either 
in intellectual power or moral tone. If his inferiority 
were perceptible, he would assuredly lose caste among 
our rough-and-ready, but often clever, artisans. Besides, 
the incumbent of a populous district has often to speak 
in public without much preparation. Not to mention 
the many extra-parochial occasions on which he is 
called upon to do so, he has to deliver his school lec¬ 
tures, his cottage expositions, his sermons to the poor 
in licensed buildings, and similar addresses, where a 
plain, unadorned, extemporaneous style is certainly the 
best.* 

[* Every clergyman is bound, both as a scholar and a gentle¬ 
man, as well as in virtue of his office, to acquire the faculty of fluent 
speaking; but unless he can devote sufficient time to the preparation 
of his sermons, so as to give them accuracy, point, and finish in 
the delivery, we would not recommend the extemporaneous method, 
that is, when addressed to an educated congregation. A sermon 
is not like a reply to a speech, where the language cannot be pre¬ 
pared beforehand; but it is a formal address, combining narrative, 
exposition, argument, and exhortation, and on a subject-matter of 
so very hackneyed a character that the speaker, without consider¬ 
able preparation, must of necessity become commonplace in his 


OUR FAILURES. 


127 


In their preparation for the pulpit we have reason to 
fear that there is great negligence among some of the 
Clergy. So long as lithographed sermons are unblush- 
ingly advertised, we must believe that the demand for 
them exists; and wherever that scandal rests, it is use¬ 
less to offer advice. It is about as hopeless as to reason 
with a Chimpanzee, or to stir up a Sloth to activity. 
Not that we would object to our clergy, especially our 
younger ones, selecting a good printed sermon, and 
making it the basis of their own ; nay, we would advise 
them to do so occasionally as being excellent practice. 
To do this well requires sound common sense and good 
literary taste. Judgment must be exercised in the 
selection of a sermon, and ability must be displayed by 
the compiler in making it his own. To discourses de¬ 
livered from the pulpit, you cannot apply the expression, 
abstractedly good : they are only good, first, relatively 
to the preacher, and, secondly, to the audience. Here 
we find a very common defect in them; they are some- 


language. There are doubtless some clerics who can preach effec¬ 
tively without much previous study: they have a natural fluency 
of speech and much self-reliance, and by long practice they have 
become masters of such topics as are mostly handled in the 
pulpit; but while a few possess this faculty, by far the greater 
number, as they reduce the labour of preparation, sink into a 
wearisome prolixity and senile garrulity. Indeed, there is a 
tendency in all really extemporaneous preachers to repeat the 
same truths in the same phrases, and to introduce the same topics 
in the same words Sunday after Sunday, so much so that in some 
instances out of two or three sermons brayed in a mortar the 
series for the twelvemonth is well-nigh compounded.— 1866 .] 


128 


OUR FAILURES . 


times quite unlike the man who delivers them; they 
are sometimes quite unsuited to the congregation: in 
either case their effect is lost. For a deacon to ascend 
with Prebendary Melvill in his balloon, or to apostro¬ 
phise with Canon McNeile, or to dogmatise with Dean 
Close, would imply a misconception of his age and 
status; and there would be no less inconsistency in a 
didactic essay on gossiping women from a University 
pulpit, or a half-hour’s discussion on a Hebrew text to 
a congregation of operatives. Then, whether a sermon 
be entirely original or a compilation, let the writer aim 
at the following qualities, besides that of consistency,— 
compactness as a whole, the lucidus ordo in arrangement, 
and a graphic distinctness of expression. If our clergy 
would occasionally get out of that groove of theological 
study in which they have a tendency to become rutted, 
and extend the sphere of their reading, it would infuse 
more vividness into their style, and enlarge their powers 
of illustration. The subjects on which they have to 
treat are necessarily trite and well-worn ; and, however 
newspaper correspondents may crave for pulpit panto • 
mime or speculative novelties, a prudent clergyman will 
keep to themes which are old and true,—only imparting 
to them, so far as he is able, a novelty in colour, a 
pointedness in expression, a beauty of diction, and a 
vividness of illustration.* 

* If our clergy would suffer a word of advice on personal 
demeanour, we would recommend them to adopt something like 
a natural tone of speaking and an unaffected manner. Why 


OUR FAILURES. 


129 


Miscellaneous Failures, in Conclusion. 

But we must stay our pen. We began our subject, 
wondering what we could find to say on it, and we dis¬ 
cover that it is inexhaustible. When Lord John Bussell 
lectured in Exeter Hall on ‘the Obstacles to Progress,’ 
he had a thesis before him wide as the world’s history; 
when we profess to discuss the question of our failures, 
we find that it embraces in its consideration a large 
proportion of the events, public and private, that are 
passing around us. Seditions, conspiracies, rebellions,— 
how rarely do they achieve their purpose ! The three 
tailors in Tooley Street, though the people of England 
in their own estimation, were yet only the third part 
of a man collectively, and we trust that they died in 
their beds. The Cato Street treason was despatched by 


assume that sour atrabilarious look and unpleasant snuffle as if 
the essence of religion was there ? Why, on the other hand, 
adopt that feminine, simpering, lackadaisical aspect, which some 
seem to regard as the characteristic of piety ? ‘ Bless thee. 

Bottom! thou art transformed!’ The clergy by such fancies 
hardly give themselves fair play. They are, on an average, we 
apprehend, as clever as their neighbours ; but they often contrive 
to make themselves look more foolish than laymen by assuming 
a face.and a bearing which are intended to indicate particular 
sanctity. They ought always to remember that they have to 
hold their own against the most and the least educated of their 
people ; but they certainly forfeit 'prestige, if not reputation, as 
teachers, by merging the manners of a Christian gentleman either 
in the vinegar aspect of a misanthrope or the maudlin airs of a 
school-girl. 

VOL. II. K 


130 


OUR FAILURES . 


the pressure of a rope on its windpipe; Chartism 
screamed and marched itself to Botany Bay; and Young 
Irelandism expired in a cabbage-garden. How many 
financial schemes have proved and are daily proving 
failures ! Many a Ministerial Budget is about as suc¬ 
cessful as that project of Feargus O’Connor which was 
interred at Snig’sEnd. Then, listen to the lamentations 
that ascend from railway shareholders at their half- 
yearly meetings, and learn how their calculations of per¬ 
centage have failed. Some people are bold enough to 
say the Reform Bill, the Corn Bill, our Foreign Diplo¬ 
macy, our Missions to the heathen, our Educational 
schemes—nay, our Representative system—perchance 
the Nineteenth Century itself—are all failures. How 
many an aspiring gentleman, again, who has electrified 
a Vestry meeting, or thundered over a Town Council, 
and has been sent up by his native borough to Parlia¬ 
ment, to let the world know that there is at least one 
orator remaining in a dull and dumb generation—how 
many an one around whom such expectations have 
hovered, has proved a failure in the House of Commons ! 
Our subject is a sorrowful one ; it is but'the record of 
dead hopes and breathless schemes. We write as though 
we were in a charnel-house, surrounded by withered and 
fleshless skeletons, that were once endowed with energy 
and animated by hope. We sit encircled by the blasted 
expectations of epic Miltons, dramatic Shakspeares, 
patriotic Hampdens, astronomical Newtons, forensic 
Erskines, philosophic Whatelys, and historic Macaulays. 
How many a sweet youth, mother’s darling, sister’s pet, 


OUR FAILURES. 


131 


spes gregis , goes up to Oxford, with the certainty of 
double-firsts, Newdegates, prize essays, and such like 
honours, and turns out a failure by being plucked for 
his little-go ! Alas ! our very life hinges on failures ; 
they insinuate themselves into the palace and the cot¬ 
tage, into the counting-house and the parlour, into 
matrimony and music, into cookery and crinolines. 
Nay, we are under an apprehension, that the very article 
we are now concluding vail have to be reckoned among 
those failures which old Time is daily sweeping down 
its stream, and as such will be classed with the potato 
crop, the cotton crop, the Institution for rectifying 
knock-knees, the Bude Light College for the diffusion 
of universal knowledge without labour, and the late 
exhibition of aristocratic flunkeyism at Cremorne.* 

And yet our article ought not to be a failure, for it 
is of country manufacture ; and though its materials of 
warp and weft be of somewhat sombre colours, it has 
been elaborated away from smoke and soot, under the 
inspiration of fresh air and green fields. Of the numer¬ 
ous contributors to Fraser we are generally amongst 
the most luckless. While many write from woodland 
glades, or suburban villas, or rural parsonages, or gay 
watering-places, or solitary sea-coasts, we are a melan¬ 
choly. individual whose lot it is to smell of train-oil the 
year round, to carry about on our hat waifs and strays 

[* The leaders of fashion during the London season engaged 
the Cremorne Gardens for a night’s select entertainment of some 
fancy kind, when they attracted some ridicule, and came in for a 
dismal wetting.—1866.] 

x 2 


132 


OUR FAILURES. 


of cotton, to inhale a fetid atmosphere as it rushes from 
the doors of our warehouses, and to breathe at best a 
compound of smoke and air. It is our destiny also to 
associate to a considerable extent with the lower classes, 
as they are called, in our populous city. No matter to 
what profession we belong : it may be that we are the 
almoner of some benevolent and wealthy old lady, or a 
lay catechist, or a collector of rates under our corpora¬ 
tion, or a relieving officer under our union, or the 
manager of a loan society, or a factory-superintendent, 
or an inspector of weights and measures, or a surveyor 
of the markets, or a furniture-broker, or a dealer in 
marine stores—all of which avocations necessarily 
bring those who follow them into frequent commu¬ 
nication with the poor. On this occasion, however, 
our dissertation, whether a failure or not, will have had 
its birth and growth in the country. We are writing 
fifty miles away from the noise and bustle, the opes 
strepitumque of Manchester; and we close this our self- 
imposed task in one of the quietest of rural retreats, and 
on an evening so still that you listen cautiously to your 
own breathing. You hear the blacksmith’s anvil ring¬ 
ing a mile off, and a railway-whistle far away beyond 
the smithy is shrieking over the valley. The labourer 
is seen a long way down the pastures returning from the 
reaping ; while the merry laugh of some boys and girls 
who have been binding up the sheaves, is heard as 
distinctly as though they were playing on the lawn 
before you. The birds have not yet retired to rest, 
though they are beginning to chirp and twitter in a 


OUB FAILUBES. 


133 


subdued tone, and the crows are sailing high in air 
from their distant marauding expeditions to their nightly 
retreat. The cattle in the distance are lying noiselessly 
and still, satisfied in their every want, and ready to 
welcome the approaching shadows of evening. The 
flowers, still wet with the noonday rain, their pearly 
drops glistening in the mellowed sunlight, are folding 
up their leaves, and with drooping heads beginning to 
sink to their repose. The sun is descending gradually 
to its golden rest, encircled by the heavy folds of many 
coloured clouds impregnated with its beams. Its rays, 
falling upon the hills which rise one behind another in 
the far-off distance, illumine and leave in shadow each 
peak in succession, till by degrees they seem to have 
forsaken the highest summit; while nearer they fall 
upon the unruffled surface of the lake, and turn it into 
a golden mirror, reflecting the crimson and saffron 
clouds that are spread along the vault of heaven ; and 
still closer at hand, they stream through the oaks and 
copper-beeches— 

Redden the fiery hues, and shoot 

Transparence through the golden. 

And now, as we are laying down our pen, and on 
the point, patient reader, of wishing you adieu, our old 
pet Gypsy, a lady purely white, of the bull and terrier 
breed, uniting the gentleness of the child with the 
courage of the lion, creeps in through the open window 
with a pup in her mouth, and leaving it whining in our 
hands, scampers off for its twin brother. No sooner 


134 


OUR FAILURES. 


has she arranged both on the carpet than she looks up 
to us for approbation and a congratulatory speech; then 
the little creatures, almost too fat to crawl, commence a 
rolling fight, which she controls gently ; and soon as 
she lies down they make up their difference by engaging 
in a furious onslaught on her for sustenance. Poor 
Gyp ! in half a year you will not recognise the offspring 
you would now fight for to the death. After she and 
her pups have had the admiration and approbation she 
courted, she removes them back to her bed. Meanwhile 
the day declines, and the night closes in, casting her 
star-bespangled mantle over the wide earth, marking off 
one more revolution on the sundial of time, and bring¬ 
ing us by so much nearer to the illimitable eternal. 
And so, gentle readers in anticipation, we wish you 

Each and all a fair good night, 

Pleasant dreams and slumbers light. 


135 


IV. 

HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES FOE CONGREGA¬ 
TIONAL WORSHIP. 


It is the proverbial characteristic of a Cockney that he 
can live to a good old age within view of St. Paul’s, and 
never gratify his curiosity by entering its doors. It is 
said that, though he is surrounded by sights the most 
interesting and attractive, he knows less about them 
than the person who resides in Cumberland or Caith¬ 
ness. ‘ Some other time ’ is his procrastinating excuse; 
and thus 

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, 

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day; 

till our friend sinks to sleep with his fathers, more 
ignorant of the treasures of art around him than the 
schoolboy who pays his first week’s holiday visit to his 
aunt in London. 

Now there is a species of literature to which almost 
every one’s eyes are open, but to which almost 
every one’s mind is closed. Who but a very select few 
pretend to know anything about the Psalms and Hymns 


136 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


that are sung in our places of worship ? Every Sunday 
they are heard with the ear; but somehow either the 
prancings of the organ accompaniment, or the sonorous 
lowings of the pastoral bassoon, seem to divert the 
thoughts from the weightier matters of sense and mean¬ 
ing. Some of our neighbours perhaps ‘ make it a busi¬ 
ness ’ to take a mentally arithmetical view of their 
week’s balance-sheet during the intervals set apart for 
singing; others, under the potent influence of the 
melody, may sink into a dozy, mesmeric sort of cogita¬ 
tion ; others, aspiring to the dignity of poetic geniuses, 
may treat with contempt the sacred rhyme set to music. 
However this may be, there can be no doubt whatever 
that our friends Sternhold and Hopkins, Tate and Brady, 
with the thousand and one collections of psalms and 
hymns, are indeed entered at Stationers’-hall, and live 
on the printer’s page, but, so far at least as their senti¬ 
ments are concerned, remain unknown, unhonoured, 
and unsung. 

We would then bespeak the reader’s patient attention 
while we endeavour to review the present condition of 
our congregational psalmody. The occupation may not 
seem to him a very elevated one; but it will not be 
without its use if it draw attention to a somewhat 
neglected department of public worship. It may appear 
a very simple subject for our investigation—one to be 
treated apis Matinee more modoque ,—but we are not 
sure whether it would not be easier to write an ela¬ 
borate critique on the Iliad or Paradise Lost than on 
a species of poetry and music so multifarious in kind, 


FOB CONGBEGA TIOFAL W OB SHIP. 


137 


and on which the schoolboy’s adage is pre-eminently 
true— Quot homines , tot sententice. 

In order to systematise our subj ect, and treat it after 
a practical manner, we will investigate these two ques¬ 
tions—First, what is the principle on which musical 
services ought to be conducted in public worship ? In 
other words, should we endeavour to give them a con¬ 
gregational character, or should they be so arranged as 
to become a performance, to which the worshippers at 
large are expected to listen, but in which they are not to 
have the privilege of joining ? Secondly, if they ought 
to be congregational in spirit and in practice, how 
approximate the nearest to this end ? 

It is a theory, with some people openly avowed, that 
the music of public worship ought to be of so operatic 
a character as to render impracticable any attempt of 
the general congregation to join in it. It is asserted, 
that, with its nicely-balanced parts and well-chosen 
voices and airy melodies, it should carry with it the 
professional air of the concert-room. Far more who 
do not avow their belief in this principle, practically 
adopt it, and are much better pleased to listen to the 
notes of others than to join their own in the harmony. 
In music of this style, it is said, there is a powerful at¬ 
traction ; and if you can bring the careless to a place of 
worship by any inducement, it must be productive of 
good. Besides, in sacred music per se, there is a ten¬ 
dency to soften the rugged heart and wing the heaven¬ 
ward aspiration. 

In this mode of argument there may be some truth. 


138 


HYMNS AND HYMN- TUNES 


We fully believe that even a coarse mind will pass 
through some process of refinement, however impercep¬ 
tible, by listening to sacred melodies well selected and 
devoutly sung. But, as a general principle of Church 
music, this theory cannot be the true one : it is clearly 
inconsistent with the nature and object of congregational 
worship. Surely it must be most accordant with the 
fitness of things for all to join in offering up adoration 
and praise in song. If the clerk now-a-days is rarely, 
found to monopolise the amen and the responses, we 
cannot see any reason why a congregation should sing 
by proxy. A vicarious performance of any portion of 
divine service must be inconsistent with the spirit of 
the Protestant faith. The notion, we hope, is exploded, 
that there is an iter ad astra regium on the nasal 
cadence of a parish clerk’s amen or the dulcet harmony 
of a duet. We do not go so far as Pope John XXII., 
who in his Bull (a.d. 1330), on the introduction of 
counterpoint, condemned those 1 persons who would 
rather have their ears tickled with semibreves and 
minims, and such frivolous inventions, than the ancient 
Church tones; ’ but it is quite clear that ear-tickling, 
whether from the orchestra or the pulpit, is not the 
true object of public worship. 

Besides, if by this style of music you offer an attrac¬ 
tion to a few, you lose by it a powerful hold over the 
many. Some of the wealthier classes perhaps may 
prefer to listen to the choir, but the middle and poorer 
choose to join with it. They who frequent the opera- 
house may wish to carry their operatic tastes into their 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP . 


139 


place of worship ; but the humbler members of a con¬ 
gregation, especially in our manufacturing districts, 
elect to ‘ sing lustily and with a good courage.’ And 
especially ought this to be kept in mind in these days 
when religious services are popularised, certainly with 
as much zeal as knowledge, for the avowed object of 
attracting to them the masses of our crowded towns. 
If there was truth in Sir Philip Sydney’s aphorism, 
1 Give me the making of a nation’s ballads, and I care 
not who makes its laws,’ there can be no reason why 
we should not acknowledge and turn to advantage the 
influence of congregational hymnology and singing on the 
opinions and conduct of our people. We know how 
powerful was the agency of hymns and hymn-singing 
in the rise and progress of Methodism. John Wesley’s 
hymn-book was as mighty as his preaching, and it is 
still the standard of Methodistic orthodoxy. Nay, in 
all religious movements where earnestness has been an 
ingredient, united psalmody has played a prominent 
part. Wycliffe in the fourteenth century, it is said, 
was anxious, among his other reforms, to restore the 
practice of congregational singing.* John Huss em¬ 
ployed hymns and spiritual songs as instruments of his 
teaching. This in a still greater degree may be said of 
Martin Luther. It is related of him by Seckendorf, the 
historian of the Reformation, that, as he was one day 
sitting in his study at Wittenberg, he was affected to 
tears by hearing a beggar singing in the streets the 
hymn of Paul Speratus, ‘ Es ist das Heil uns kommen 

* Dr. Burney’s History of Music, v. iii. p. 30. 


140 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 




her, aus lauter Gnad’ und Giite ; ’* and that he at once 
felt how powerful an instrument he had in such compo¬ 
sitions set to good music for the propagation of his 
startling doctrines. Wherever the Reformation made 
its way, it was characterised by congregational singing. 
Roger Ascham writing from Augsburg, a.d. 1551, says— 

1 Three or four thousand singing at a time in a church 
of this city is but a trifle.’ ‘ Psalms and hymns,’ writes 
Bishop Burnet, ‘ were sung by all who love the Refor¬ 
mation ; it was a sign by which men’s affections to it 
were measured, whether they used to sing them or not.’ 
Bishop Jewel, writing to Peter Martyr in the year 1560, 
says— 1 A change now appears visible among the people, 
which nothing promotes more than inviting them to 
sing psalms ; this was begun in one church in London, 
and did quickly spread itself through the city and the 
neighbouring towns. Sometimes in St. Paul’s church¬ 
yard, after sermon at the Cross, there will be six 
thousand people singing together.^’ 

In proof of our position, take a few illustrations of 
that species of music which may be termed the uncon- 
gregational and impracticable. The extremes of taste 
in this style are embodied in the performance of the 
rustic church singers and of the fine city choir. 

There may be those who have never listened to the 

* Our whole salvation doth depend on God’s free grace and 
spirit. 

t When Shakspeare made Sir John FalstafF long to he ‘a 
weaver,’ that he might ‘ sing psalms or anything,’ he is guilty of 
an anachronism; but he indicates the sympathies of a certain 
class in his age. 


FOB CONGBEGA TIONAL W OB SHIP. 


141 


sweet music of a country choir; our earliest recollec¬ 
tions are resonant with the bucolic melodies. We have 
heard funeral dirges droned out after a fashion so 
melancholy and nasal as to have satisfied the most 
lugubrious puritan ; we have heard the marriage psalm 
with all its quavers and semi-quavers, metaphors and 
benevolent sentiments. Probably there are few illus¬ 
trations of unconscious humour so thoroughly humour¬ 
ous as that of a rustic band of church singers going 
with the gravity of so many Lord Chancellors through 
the metrical version of the 128th Psalm. Some village 
belle has been married during the week, and she is now 
in church with the wedding party. After the clerk has 
snuffled out the nasal prelude, the instrumentalists begin 
vigorously and the vocalists join as heartily ; the words 
are set to a lively air full of repetitions ; all the hearers 
are at first sufficiently grave; changes innumerable are 
rung on the connubial blessings in prospect; when 
the ladies in the squire’s pew begin to bite their lips, 
the country beauties to hang down their heads, a few 
sprightly lads to titter, and the only persons unmoved 
are the singers themselves, three or four crabbed old 
spinsters, and the clergyman, who is fortified in his 
official indifference. 

Mr. Latrobe is as humorous as so sedate a writer can 
be on the music of a country choir. He represents one 
exhibiting its powers to a newly appointed clergyman. 

At the appointed time [he says] they commence. The first 
specimen he—the fresh incumbent—has of his choir is perhaps 
ushered in by a clarionet, which, though rather a favourite in 


142 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


country churches, is the most hapless in untutored hands. This 
is commissioned to lead off, and after some dreadful hiccups on 
the part of the instrument, which is its infirmity when clumsily 
dealt with, and which chases the blood chill through the veins, 
the tune is completed and the singing proceeds. Then other 
instruments are introduced— 

the flute, 

And the vile squeaking of the wry-necked fife, 

and, it may be, breaking suddenly in with portentous thunder, 
after three or four notes spent in gathering up the long clam¬ 
bering instrument, some unlucky deep-mouthed bassoon. It 
may readily be conceived that these instruments, by their 
united clamour, will lay a sufficient foundation of noise upon 
which the singers may rear their superstructure. This they 
proceed to do with their whole breath and lungs, each striving 
to surpass his neighbour in vociferation : till, exhausted with 
exercise, they gradually cease according to the tenure of their 
breath; the bassoon player, for the dignity of his instrument, 
commencing his last note rather later than the rest, and, by a 
peculiar motion of his shoulders, pumping out the whole power 
of his lungs in one prolonged and astounding roar.’ * 

Fie, Mr. Latrobe. Turn we to a more genial-hearted 
chronicler. O rare Washington Irving ! Who cannot 
attest the truthfulness of thy description ? 

The orchestra [he writes] was in a small gallery, and presented 
a most whimsical grouping of heads piled one above the other, 
among which I particularly noticed that of the village tailor, a 
pale fellow with a retreating forehead and chin, who played on 
the clarionet, and seemed to have blown his face to a point; and 


* The Music of the Church , by John Antes Latrobe, M.A., 
chap. iii. This work, published in 1831, is not so extensively 
known as it deserves to be. It contains much valuable matter 
in a somewhat cumbrous form. 



FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


143 


there was another, a short pursy man, stooping and labouring at a 
bass viol, so as to show nothing but the top of a round bald head, 
like the egg of an ostrich. There were two or three pretty faces 
among the female singers, to which the keen air of a frosty 
morning had given a bright rosy tint; but the gentlemen 
choristers had evidently been chosen, like old Cremona fiddles, 
more for tone than looks: and as several had to sing from the 
same book, there were clusterings of odd physiognomies, not 
unlike those groups of cherubs we sometimes see on country 
tombstones. The usual services of the choir were managed 
tolerably well, the vocal parts generally lagging a little behind the 
instrumental, and some loitering fiddler now and then making up 
for lost time by travelling over a passage with prodigious celerity, 
and clearing more bars than the keenest fox-hunter, to be in at 
the death. But the great trial was an anthem. Unluckily there 
was a blunder at the very outset; the musicians became flurried; 
everything went on lamely and irregularly until they came to a 
chorus, beginning, ‘Now let us sing with one accord,’ which 
seemed to be a signal for parting company; all became discord 
and confusion; each shifted for himself, and got to the end as well, 
or rather as soon, as he could, excepting one old chorister in a 
pair of horn spectacles bestriding and pinching a long sonorous 
nose ; who happening to stand a little apart, and being wrapped 
up in his own melody, kept on a quavering course, wriggling his 
head, ogling his book, and winding all up by a nasal solo of at 
least three bars duration.’* 

We, too, like Washington Irving the inimitable, have 
our musical memories of Christmas long ago. How 
many times did our house resound with the old carol, 
1 While shepherds watched their flocks by night,’ given 
in the full vigour of lungs and instrumentation, from 
six in the morning till nine at night on Christmas-day ! 


* The Sketch-hook ,—‘ Christmas-day.’ 


144 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


We regret to say that some of those peripatetic minstrels, 
both of church and dissenting choirs, used to become 
towards evening considerably bemused with strong 
liquors. We remember one fat proprietor of a violon¬ 
cello, when he had come to the dashing passage, ‘ And 
this shall .be a sign,’ losing his centre of gravity with 
the energetic working of his elbows, toppling over, and 
smashing his instrument. As he and his party were 
returning, two or three of us, boys from school, sent 
some Roman-candle balls among them from the shrub¬ 
bery, when they all took to their heels as though Lucifer 
himself was after them with his blue lights, the stout 
musician with the fragments being in the rear, holloing 
and staggering and praying as each fiery ball pursued 
him. 

The particular choir in our own church we recollect 
well to this day, and some of their most striking tunes. 
We used to listen with mingled awe and admiration to 
the performance of the 18th Psalm in particular. Take 
two lines as an illustration of their style,— 

And snatched me from the furious rage 
Of threatening waves that proudly swelled. 

The words, 1 And snatched me from,’ were repeated 
severally by the trebles, the altos, the tenors, and the 
bass voices; then all together sang the words two or three 
times over; in like manner did they toss and tumble 
over ‘ the furious rage,’ apparently enjoying the whirli¬ 
gig scurrying of their fugues, like so many kittens chas¬ 
ing their own tails; till, at length, after they had torn 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


145 


and worried that single line even to the exhaustion of 
the most powerful lungs—after a very red-faced bass, 
who kept the village inn, had become perceptibly apo¬ 
plectic about the eyes, and the bassoon was evidently 
blown, and a tall thin man with a long nose, which was 
his principal vocal organ, and which sang tenor, was 
getting out of wind—they all, clarionet, bassoon, violon¬ 
cello, the red-faced man, the tall tenor, and the rest, 
rushed pell-mell into ‘ the threatening waves that proudly 
swelled.’ We have not forgotten the importance with 
which they used to walk up the church path in a body, 
with their instruments, after this effort; and our 
childish fancy revelled in the impression that, after the 
clergyman, and the Duke of Wellington, who had won 
the battle of Waterloo a few years before, these singers 
were the most notable public characters in being. 

But we must make a truce with memory, or we shall 
lose the thread of our argument. We recollect, how¬ 
ever, one exhibition of psalmody which was so novel 
that we must needs describe it. Whoever has stayed 
a few weeks in the neighbourhood of Windermere will 
have found out that the twenty-third psalm, put to a 
local ranting tune, is a favourite one there. One por¬ 
tion of it runs thus :— 

. Then leads me to cool shades, and where 
Refreshing water flows. 

In the last line the tune has a musical division after the 
second syllable, and the latter part, ‘ shing water flows,’ 
is repeated almost ad infinitum. Being on a tour through 


VOL. II. 


L 


146 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


the Lake district, we happened to attend a very rural 
chapel where this psalm was given out; but whether 
there had been ‘ a strike ’ among the singers, or they 
had gone to give eclat to some neighbouring charity 
sermon, certainly the old clerk, white-headed and 
weather-beaten, was the only chorister on the occasion. 
Now, it happened very mal-apropos that, after he had 
set fairly to his work, an old goose, with a dozen well- 
behaved goslings, walked through the open doorway, and 
up the aisle, right in his face, as leisurely and demurely 
as a lady abbess at the head of her band of youthful 
neophytes. What was to be done ? The moment was 
critical; the old clerk was on the point of repeating his 
‘ shing water flows.’ Observe the value of presence of 
mind. He stepped boldly out of his desk. 1 Shoo ! 
shoo ! ’ he hissed out at the old goose, waving his arms; 

‘ shing water flows,’ he continued, taking up the dropped 
note ; * qua-ake ! qua-ake ! ’ chimed in the goslings as 
an accompaniment; and the intruders were ejected 
about the time the verse was ended. If we recollect 
aright, our devotions were spoiled for that day. 

But while we do not reckon your rustic choir perfect, 
we admire it quite as much as that which is got up at 
so much expense in your fine city church. Both the 
one and the other are engaged in performances—Popish 
ceremonies, in which the laity were never intended to 
take a part. But give us the rural melodies before 
those elaborate displays which may delectate sentimental 
ladies and effete opera-loungers, but which can never 
afford pleasure to Christian worshippers. Our duty on 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP . 


147 


the occasion of such a performance is to pray, as Keble 
says, for 1 grace to listen well.’ In your country choir 
you find an honesty of face and a reality of purpose, at 
any rate; in your operatic orchestra there is often a 
very dirty mixture of character—an unsavoury smell 
of the singing saloon. Nor can anything be in worse 
taste artistically than these displays often are ; no, not 
even the silliest exhibitions of our rustic singers. 

We would not wish by any means that the anthem 
should be discontinued in cathedrals and churches where 
the choir is competent to undertake it. But that the 
effect may be solemnising, the music should be such as 
beseemeth the house of God, not the concert-room. 
The notion of an anthem now-a-days is too often as¬ 
sociated with great musical display; it is that portion 
of divine service which pales by its lustre the prayers 
and the sermon. What a disgraceful evidence of this 
have we at some of our cathedrals, in the mob-like rush 
out of doors after it has been sung ! Have the authori¬ 
ties no power to stop this shameful exposure of bad 
manners and gross irreligon ? Better suppress the per¬ 
formance than permit such a desecration of a house of 
prayer. 

We are at no loss to perceive, then, what we desiderate 
in our church music. Our singing should be congrega¬ 
tional. We have common prayer: why not common 
praise ? The great object of every clergyman, in ar¬ 
ranging the musical department of his service, ought tp 
be to induce as many as possible to unite in it. What 
really is more chilling than the aspect of a church where 

ii 2 


148 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


no one joins in singing the praises of God ? What more 
cheering than a hearty union of many voices, even 
though a discord be occasionally perceptible to a refined 
ear ? And especially in our manufacturing towns, 
where there is an innate fondness for music among the 
operative class, is it well to keep this in view. Dr. 
Burney’s theory of church music was a very easy-going 
one. 1 Why,’ he asks, 1 is all the congregation to sing, 
more than to preach and to read prayers ? ’* 1 Why,’ 
asks Dr. Maurice on the other hand, 1 why should the 
people be left uncared for, and not recognised as the 
body of the church visible ? are they to be preached at 
from the pulpit ? sung to by the choir? prayed for from 
the desk ? and then, after this, shall we complain of the 
absence of the poor of the flock from our buildings, and 
their frequenting those places where their feelings, at 
any rate, find a vent in accents of praise, and where 
they have the privilege of enjoying and participating in 
one of the essentials of public worship ? ’f 

But we proceed to the inquiry,—How attain to this 
end ? By what means, at any rate, approximate as nearly 
as possible to it ? This, we fear, will prove the more 
difficult part of our undertaking. It is at all times 
easier to find out when we are wrong than how we may 
get right. In order, therefore, to investigate the subject 

* This ridiculous question is examined in a very proper spirit 
by Mason, Essay iii. 

, f Preface to Choral Harmony, by the Rev. Peter Maurice, D.D., 
New College, Oxford. See also the first preface to the Rev. Mr, 
Mercer’s Hymn Book. 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


149 


fully and fairly, we will consider these three questions,— 
How far have we the privilege and right to choose our 
own Hymnal ? What is the kind of Hymn-book most 
suitable for selection ? And what is the nature of the 
music we must adapt to it ? 

It may seem to be unnecessary at this time to discuss 
the first question; for, legally or illegally, there are 
few clergymen now who stand so steadfastly on the old 
ways as to confine themselves to the metrical versions 
of the psalms. We are amused in these days to think 
that, of all men, Mr. Romaine, in his treatise on 
Psalmody, should have held up Sternhold and Hopkins 
to admiration, and condemned Dr. Watts almost to 
perdition for ‘ not only taking precedence of the Holy 
Ghost, but thrusting Him out of the Church.’ Occa¬ 
sionally, however, a dozy old parson may be found who 
does not like to be troubled with novelties; or an an¬ 
tique of the high and dry school, who cannot sing but 
in the words of inspiration; or a modern Tractarian, 
who makes a mouthful of 1 unauthorised hymns and 
versions.’ It may not be amiss, therefore, to examine 
the legal powers of an incumbent in this matter. 

An impression doubtless has very generally prevailed, 
that no sooner do we step over the boundary fence ot 
Sternhold and Hopkins, or Tate and Brady, than we 
are liable to a prosecution ‘according to the utmost 
rigour of the law.’ It must have gradually stolen over 
the minds of good churchmen from the fact of our au¬ 
thorised liturgy and a metrical version of the psalms 
being under the same cover. If, however, we refer to 


150 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


the 1 royal permission ’ prefixed to Tate and Brady’s ver¬ 
sion, it is clear that neither King William, nor Compton, 
Bishop of London, nor Tate and Brady, ever contem¬ 
plated anything like an enforcement of this version on 
any congregation whatever. They had no more right 
to interfere with the Act of Uniformity than Queen 
Victoria and A. C. London have in this day the power 
in themselves to alter and amend our liturgy. The 
petition of Nicholas Brady and Nahum Tate to King 
William was, for ‘ his Majesty’s Royal allowance that the 
said version might be used in such congregations as should 
think Jit to receive it .’ Then, 1 His Majesty taking the 
same into his royal consideration is pleased to order in 
Council that the said New Version of the Psalms, in 
English metre, be, and the same is hereby allowed and 
permitted to be, used in all churches, chapels, and 
congregations, as shall think Jit to receive the same.' 
This document is headed, ‘ G. R. At the council of 
Kensington, Dec. 3rd, 1696,’ and signed 1 W. Bridgman.’ 
Then follows another signed 1 H. London,’ in which he 
recommends the use of this version 1 to all his brethren 
within his diocese .’ 1 Here is no command or injunc¬ 

tion,’ writes Bishop Beveridge, 1 nor the least intimation 
of his Majesty’s pleasure that it should be anywhere 
received, but rather that all should consider (as I and 
others have done) whether it be fit to be received or not, 
and to receive it or not receive it, according as they do 
or do not think fit.* 

But if the royal document does not enforce any ver- 
<■ * Beveridge’s Defence, p. 106. 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


151 


sion of psalms on a congregation, does it not protect its 
members, or the clergy, from the penalty of infringing 
the Act of Uniformity ? 

It is clear (says Mr. Procter, speaking of the Old Version) that 
the royal permission was not regarded as an authority for the use 
of anything that was not specified in the Book of Common Prayer ; 
although it would relieve from the penalties of the Act of Uni¬ 
formity those who sung metrical psalms, or hymns, or anthems, 
in addition to the prescribed services. The royal license gives 
the same liberty at the present time.* 

Now if Mr. Procter means that the permission of 
William, or any succeeding sovereign, protects us from 
a prosecution under the Act of Uniformity, we demur 
to his exposition of the law. If the Act were infringed 
by singing psalms from the New Version, we do not 
think that the royal permission would legalise the prac¬ 
tice. But we deny in toto that we break any law by 
the use of either hymns or psalms in public worship, 
assuming that they contain sound doctrine. There 
have been several instances of hymn-books, as such, 
being interdicted by ecclesiastical dignitaries; but so 
far as we believe, the veto has always been ineffec¬ 
tual. And if, fifty years ago, the objection was never 
carried into court or certainly substantiated, it is not 
likely that it would be in the year 1860. The collec¬ 
tion published by Cotterill in the province of York was 
in the teeth of ecclesiastical authority on its first 

* A History of the Book of Common Prayer, with a Rationale 
of its Offices, by the Kev. Francis Procter, M.A., &c., p. 162.— 
1855. 


152 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


announcement.* We apprehend that in real truth a 
clergyman has as much right to provide his own hymns 
as his sermon Our Rubrics appoint a place for the 
anthem, ‘ where they sing,’ and they state where the 
sermon shall come in; but neither the one nor the other 
is authoritatively prescribed: the officiating minister 
has the charge of both, and is responsible for both the 
matter and manner of one as well as the other. He 
may select a metrical hymn as an anthem,f and he may 

* This is the collection to which Montgomery alludes as being 
partly his production. * Good Mr. Cotterill and I,’ he says, 
* bestowed a great deal of care and labour on the compilation of the 
Sheffield Hymn-book, clipping, interlining, and remodelling hymns 
of all sorts, as we thought we could correct the sentiment, or 
improve the expression. We so altered some of Cowper’s that 
the poet would hardly know them.’ The book is still somewhat 
extensively used. 

The Society for promoting Christian Knowledge, which is 
under episcopal direction, is now issuing its prayer-books bound 
up, not with ‘ Tate and Brady,’ but with its own hymnal. 

f The anthem was introduced into our church service in the 
reign of Elizabeth, and was intended to supersede the motets and 
commemorations which were sung to Latin words in the Church 
of Rome. Shakspeare here also is guilty of an anachronism, 
when he makes the fat knight declare that he had lost his voice 
with ‘holloing and singing of anthems.’ The term anthem, 
we imagine, in a strictly rubrical sense, has a wider meaning than 
we commonly attach to it; an ordinary hymn in the place ap¬ 
pointed for it fulfils the rubrical direction quite as completely 
as the ‘ Hallelujah Chorus.’ Indeed, in the anthem books of 
some of our ancient cathedrals, we have seen prose pieces and 
metrical hymns side by side. Dr. Johnson defines the term as 
‘ a song performed in divine service; ’ Dr. Hook, as * a hymn sung’ 
in parts alternately.’ [The latter seems to have been its original 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


153 


range over the broad pastures of divinity in the prepara¬ 
tion of his sermon. If it be urged, on the other hand, 
that the Rubrics give no permission for singing before 
and after the communion service, this objection applies 
as forcibly to Tate and Brady’s psalms as to hymns. 
Here we fall back upon custom; and we believe that 
the practice of singing in other parts of our service 
than those specified by the rubrics has been continu¬ 
ously maintained since the Reformation. In the Act of 
Uniformity of Edward VI., 2 and 3, it is ordered ‘ that 
the form of worship directed in the Book of Common 
Prayer shall be used in the Church, and no other ; but 
with this proviso, that it shall be lawful for all men, as 
well in churches, chapels, oratories, or other places, 
to use openly any psalm or prayer taken out of the 
Bible, at any due time , not letting or omitting thereby 
the service or any part thereof, ‘ mentioned in the said 
book.’ Elizabeth’s injunction is well known, that ‘ in 
the beginning, or in the end of Common Prayer, either 
at morning or evening, there may be sung an hymn, or 
such like song to the praise of Almighty God, in the 
best sort of melody and music that may be conveniently 

signification. ‘ Several quires/ writes Lord Bacon (of Masques), 
* placed one against another, and taking the voice by catches, 
antheme-wise, give great pleasure.’ The derivation of the word is 
given in various ways. Dr. Johnson says, it is from av6v/j.vos — * 
aur) v/jLuos. So Webster. Richardson goes a long way for its root, 
in avTi<puv'ia. Todd finds it in the Saxon. But is it not plainly 
derived from avddrj/xa — avd TiQrifii —the am having the reflex 
sense as in the Latin and English re-, and Ori^a being the root of 
the English ‘theme’?—1866.] 


154 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


devised, having respect that the sentence (sense) of the 
hymn may be nnderstanded and perceived.’ It has 
been remarked by Heylin that in this proclamation ‘ no 
mention is made of singing David’s Psalms in metre.’ 
This department of our service has always been regarded 
as extraneous to our Liturgy. In the Conference of 
1661, the dissenting party made this proposition—‘ In 
regard that singing of psalms is a considerable part of 
public worship, they desire the version set forth and 
allowed to be sung in churches may be mended, or that 
they may have leave to make use of a new translation.’ 
To this proposition the answer of the bishops was 
very curt. ‘ Singing of psalms in metre is no part of 
the Liturgy, and by consequence no part of our com¬ 
mission.’* 


* Cardwell, Doc. Ann., xliii. § 49; Collier, Eccles. Hist., v. 469 ; 
Procter, Hist, of Book of Common Prayer, p. 55. 

That hymns of uninspired composition have been sung in the 
Christian church from the earliest time, there can be no doubt. 
Pliny’s remark is well known, that the Christians were accus¬ 
tomed to * sing a hymn to Christ as God.’ Justin Martyr, in the 
second century, says— 4 Approving ourselves faithful to God by 
celebrating his praises with hymns and other solemnities.’—(See 
Burney’s Hist., v. 11, p. 3). For a catena of Christian hymn- 
writers from the earliest period of church history, see a well- 
written work, called The Voice of Christian Life in Song, Nesbit, 
1858. See also Dr. Trench’s Sacred Latin Poetry. Eusebius 
alludes several times to the use of hymns by uninspired men 
(Lib. 11, 17, and v. 23, and vii. 24). Bingham brings forward 
sufficient testimony to this fact. The apostle’s exhortation to the 
use of ‘psalms, and hymns, and spiritual songs’ (Eph. v. 19), 
has never been disregarded in the Christian church from his 
day to ours. 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


155 


If we investigate the history of Royal Permissions, 
we find that they have been very cheap commodities. 
We cannot pretend to say how many such ‘allowances’ 
have been given ; but unquestionably the number is 
very considerable. We have the following authenti¬ 
cated instances of the whole Psalter receiving the 
* Royal Permission —that of Sternhold and Hopkins 
(1562), of King James (1631), of Rouse (1641), of 
Barton (1654), of Archbishop Parker (1661), of Tate 
and Brady (1696), of Sir R. Blackmore (1721); but 
we apprehend that there have been many more than 
these either for the whole or a part of the Psalms. We 
have now before us A Supplement to the New Version 
of Psalms by Dr. Brady and Mr. Tate ; it contains 
psalms and hymns and tunes, and ‘ the whole ’ is 
described to be ‘a compleat psalmody.’ It is dated 
1724, and has the royal permission of Queen Anne. 
Most probably, however, the Church congregations of the 
day did not ‘ think fit to receive it,’ for we have never 
met with it bound up with any prayer-book. These 
‘allowances’ have no doubt been more numerous than 
any extant records of them testify. Probably they 
settled by degrees into mere matters of form, and 
thus of indifference. This laxity may account for the 
admission of those hymns for particular occasions into 
the Psalter which we find at the end of the authorised 
versions. The two by Doddridge, ‘ My God, and is 
thy table spread ? ’ and ‘ High let us swell our tuneful 
notes,’ must have been inserted less than a century ago; 
for we can scarcely think that the compositions of a 


156 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


Nonconformist would have been thus appropriated dur¬ 
ing his life; but we have never been able to satisfy 
ourselves at what time or by what authority it was 
done.* 

Having shown, as we believe, that there is neither 
legal nor reasonable objection to the use of hymn-books 
in our churches, let us consider next what kind of col¬ 
lection may be chosen with most advantage. 

If we take a review of the hymnology of our country, 
it is surprising how few really good compositions of this 
class can be found. Whether this be attributable to 
the difficulty of this style of versification, or the unsuit¬ 
ableness of the subjects to the tastes of our poets, it is not 
easy to say; perhaps we may trace it to a combination 
of these causes. Montgomery combats Dr. Johnson’s 
remark, that 1 poetical devotion cannot often please; ’ f 
and endeavours to prove that, if our secular favourites 
of the Muses had been under the influence of religious 
feeling, they would have left behind them hymns ‘ as 
splendid in poetry as fervent in devotion.’| In this, 
doubtless, there is much truth; though it is question- 

* * The introduction of hymns for Christian seasons or parti¬ 
cular services is due, probably, to “ the stationers ” before the 
Revolution, and to the university printers in modern times, more 
particularly to one of the latter about half a century ago, who, 
being a Dissenter, thought fit to fill up the blank leaves at the 
end of the Prayer-book with hymns suggested by himself.’— 
‘Hymns and Hymn-writers,’ by C. B. Pearson, M.A., Oriel 
College —Oxford Essays. 1858. 

f Life of Waller. 

| Introductory Essay to the Christian Psalmist. 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP ; 157 

able whether it contains the whole truth. That mere 
poetic fancy can scarcely of itself produce a good hymn 
is pretty clear; and that strong uncultivated religious 
feeling may go a long way towards it is equally certain. 
There are few hymns more generally known than ‘ Lo ! 
he comes with clouds descending,’ and 1 The God of 
Abraham praise,’ both of which were written by T. 
Olivers, a shoemaker at Bristol. 

We have a firm belief that to write a good hymn is 
no easy task. As with a sermon, nothing is so easy as 
to write onefew things are more difficult than to 
write a good one. Montgomery—unconsciously, it 
may be—applies Aristotle’s law of tragedy to a hymn.* 
It ‘ must have,’ he writes, 1 a beginning, middle, and 
end. There must be a manifest gradation in the 
thoughts, and their mutual dependence should be so 
perceptible that they could not be transposed without 
injuring the unity of the piece.’f Then it is no easy 
matter to acquire the style necessary for a good hymn. 
There must be an avoidance of all florid ornament on 
the one hand, and of meanness in expression and coarse¬ 
ness in idea on the other; there must be devotional 
feeling, clothed in simple and sublime language. It is 
by no means clear to our mind that the poet who 
might gain applause by an epic could succeed in hymn 
writing, even though he were deeply impressed with 
religious sentiments. We may consider Bishop Ken 
and Dean Milman on an equality in devotional spirit; 


* Poetics , ch. vii. 


f Introductory Essay. 


158 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


but while the Dean is decidedly a better poet, his hymns 
are scarcely equal to those of the Bishop for morning, 
evening, and midnight. 

We are far from meaning that a poetic temperament 
is a disqualification for the composition of hymns; such 
an assertion would be little less than a contradiction in 
terms. In this kind of writing, however, the imagina¬ 
tion has little play; feeling must be the parent of 
thought; and this thought must be clothed in language 
sublime, yet unadorned. Numbers of lyrical pieces are 
very beautiful in their poetry, and devotional too; but 
entirely unfit for congregational singing. Addison has 
left one or two elegant hymns; still they are more 
refined than fervid, and contain but little recognition of 
Christian doctrine. Cowper, from whom we might have 
looked for much in this style of writing, has not fulfilled 
our expectation; he has left some hymns, but not 
many, worthy of his reputation. The number of 
Montgomery’s that can be regarded as superior is com¬ 
paratively with the aggregate, very small. His ‘ Hail 
to the Lord’s anointed !’ will rank with the best in the 
English language. Logan, Heber, the Grants, Milman, 
have each given us a few, combining good poetry with 
devotional feeling; but might we not have expected 
more from their undoubted powers ? Of Lyte we know 
comparatively little personally: he died young, we 
believe; and he has certainly left behind some of the 
very best hymns in our language. Where shall we 
find a nobler composition of the kind than that com¬ 
mencing ‘ Praise my soul, the king of heaven,’ or one 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


159 


more touching in sentiment than his 1 Abide with me V 
On the other hand, such writers as Watts, Doddridge, 
the two Wesleys, and Toplady, cannot be said to have 
had any element of real poetry in their natures; and 
yet some of their hymns are perhaps more popular than 
those of Milman or Heber. Even John Newton, well 
disposed, but prosaic, has produced a few occasional 
verses that are not without merit. 

In compiling or selecting a hymn-book, seek after a 
combination of these two properties—lowness of price 
and excellence of quality. As you intend it for the 
poor as well as the rich, it is very desirable that the 
cost be within the means of the humblest in your con¬ 
gregation. You will thereby avoid the necessity of 
selling your hymn-books at a reduced price—a system 
attended on the whole with many pernicious effects. 
We have seen one collection that is published for a 
penny,* and another for five shillings, and we certainly 
prefer the former. 

But some person may allege that it is impossible to 
obtain for fourpence or sixpence a collection of sufficient 
variety for ordinary wants. Nothing can be more 
foolish than such a supposition. If the ancient maxim 
were true —fxiya j3i(3\iov, /xiya kukov — it is especially 
applicable to a hymn-book. What really can be a 
more intolerable patience-exasperator than one contain- 

* The Church Hymn-Rook , edited by John Allen, M.A., Arch¬ 
deacon of Salop, &c. Price one penny. It contains 125 hymns. 
The S.P.C.K. has within the last few months published its col¬ 
lection of hymns (200) at a still lower price. 


160 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


ing some five hundred pages, made up of appendix after 
appendix, with innumerable specialties, till it becomes 
more perplexing than Bradshaw ? And out of those 
nine hundred hymns, how many are in the slightest 
degree deserving the name? We have now before us 
half-a-dozen collections containing each from 700 to 
about 1200 psalms and hymns; and if you would ven¬ 
ture to explore this poetical terra incognita , you would 
find with some surprise what a small extent of paper 
surface would suffice for the really good or even average 
compositions. At a rough guess there may be 5000 
hymns in the English language. Watts wrote 600; 
Doddridge 375 ; the Wesleys 769 ; Cowper and Newton 
about 400 ; Montgomery 355 ; and as many more may 
have originated with all the less prolific sacred poets 
together; but we very much question whether there be 
more than two hundred that can take their place among 
the classics of our national poetry. 

But you love a big hymn-book, do you ? Come, 
reach us that dropsical volume of a thousand hymns, 
and let us tap it. Let off the vast mass of mere doggrel 
it contains. Extract all those pieces which John Wesley 
describes as ‘ too amorous, and more fitted to be ad¬ 
dressed by a lover to his fellow mortal than by a sinner 
to the Most High God or, as Heber describes them, 
those ‘ erotic addresses to Him whom no unclean lip 
can approach.’ Rack off all florid prettinesses as though 
they were imitations of Moore, and all rhythmical 
jingles befitting the chorus of a bacchanalian or a hunt¬ 
ing song. Draw away all mere odes, such as ‘ Vital 


FOE CONGEEGATIONAL WOE SHIP. 


161 


spark,’ all mere descriptive pieces, all mere sacred 
lyrics, as well as all those compositions that are plainly 
more appropriate for the closet than for public worship; 
and you will find that your bulky, swollen, lymphatic 
volume is now reduced to some hundred or hundred 
and fifty hymns, and presents really a very respectable 
figure in comparison with its former self. 

It cannot be denied, however, that there is much 
diversity of opinion upon these two questions—What 
constitutes a hymn as distinguished from sacred poetry 
generally ? and what is the differential character of one 
as adapted to congregational singing ? While we quite 
acquiesce in the principle of these distinctions, we ven¬ 
ture to say that much must ever be left to individual 
tastes on these points. Mr. Pearson, for instance, seems 
to consider that a hymn must necessarily contain an 
address to the Deity.* This, however, cannot be sus¬ 
tained. Adopt this rule, and you exclude one-half the 
psalter. In the hundredth psalm there is no direct 
address to the Supreme Being. May we not perform 
an act of adoration and utter expressions of worship by 
singing of God as well as to God ? Augustine defines a 
hymn as ‘ a song to the praise of God.’ We prefer one 
addressed to the Almighty, but we do not necessarily 
exclude one that is not. Again, tastes vary respecting 
the characteristics required in a hymn for congregational 
singing. Whitefield lays it dowu in his dashing style, 
that ‘hymns composed for public worship ought to 
abound much in thanksgiving, and to be of such a 

* ‘Hymns and Hymn-writers.’ Oxford Essays , pp. 146 and 157. 

VOL. II. M 


162 


HYMNS ANJ) HYMN-TUNES 


nature that all who attend may join in them without 
being obliged to sing lies, or not sing at all.’ This is 
in part true. Congregational hymns ought to be catholic 
in sentiment; but if you endeavour to eliminate every 
expression that does not accord with individual condi¬ 
tions of feeling, you will render your composition very 
bald, negative, and inane. For example, a reviewer 
in the ‘ Christian Remembrancer ’ pronounces Cowper’s 
hymn, ‘ O for a closer walk with God,’ quite out 
of the question for the purpose of public worship.* 
The Rev. W. E. Dickson declares that it is an act of 
irreverence and desecration for a mixed congregation to 
sing it.j* We should not ourselves select the hymn 
for congregational worship; but many, without ques¬ 
tion, will think that there is something fanciful in 
these objections. We find a tone similar to that 
of the hymn running through Several of the psalms 
—as an illustration, take the 63rd—which are sung 
or read without objection of inconsistency by 1 a 
mingled multitude of persons.’ Again, Mr. Pearson 
asserts that there is ‘ a painful unreality bordering 
upon irreverence ’ in a whole congregation promis¬ 
cuously singing Doddridge’s Sacramental Hymn; J 
whereas many would see nothing unbecoming in their 
using such expressions in song as ‘ O let thy table 
honoured be,’ and ‘ Revive thy dying churches, Lord.’ 
Mr. Dickson says, ‘ the pronoun “I” should not appear 

* Ko. lxvi., October, 1849. A very elaborate article. 

f A Letter to the Lord Bishov of Salisbury , cfc. By the Rev. 
W. E. Dickson. \ Page 154. 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


163 


in any hymn designed for congregational use.’* As a 
rule doubtless this is correct; but it is somewhat prag¬ 
matical to make it an unbending law. On this principle 
the two creeds, the Magnificat , the Nunc dimitis , and 
four-fifths of the Psalms of David, must be excluded. 
Indeed, we feel assured that the more reflection a person 
bestows on questions of this kind, the more will he come 
to the conclusion that a judicious latitude must be per¬ 
mitted. 

Further; what but useless lumber in many of our 
collections is that loiig list of children’s hymns? We 
are not depreciating these compositions in themselves 5 
they are most useful in the junior classes of Sunday- 
schools ; but that is no good reason why you should 
overload your church hymn-book with childish prattle. 
Sometimes—as, for instance, when sermons are preached 
and collections made in behalf of Sunday-schools—these 
effusions are introduced into public worship, and with 
a very ridiculous effect. Our Sunday-schools now, 
especially in manufacturing towns, contain a large pro¬ 
portion of male and female adults, and we have on many 
occasions been tempted to smile on hearing lusty young 
men and women, with voices of unusual compass, sing¬ 
ing the strains of babes and sucklings. Not long ago 
we attended the church of a friend on the occasion of 
his Sunday-school Anniversary, as it is termed—the day 
of the annual sermons and collections for its support. 
He had arranged some seventy or eighty female scholars, 


* Letter <fu, p. 29. 
m 2 


164 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


dressed in white frocks and caps, in a conspicuous part 
of the church—good-looking, fresh-coloured, bouncing 
women of twenty; and what do you suppose was the 
hymn he put into their mouths ? Why, the one written 
by Charles Wesley for the orphan school at Kingswood 
near Bristol. Take a few verses of it. 

• We all his kind protection share; 

Within his arms we rest; 

The sucklings are his tender care, 

While hanging on the breast. 

We praise him with a faltering tongue, 

While under his defence ; 

He smiles to hear the artless song 
Of childlike innocence. 

He loves to he remembered thus, 

And honoured for his grace; 

Out of the mouths of babes like us, 

His wisdom perfects praise. 

We remonstrated with our friend afterwards on the 
absurdity of his selection; but with a sort of pig-headed 
gravity he maintained that he could not be far wrong, 
as the hymn was one in his collection intended for 
Sunday-schools. Is it not better, however, whether in 
the Sunday-school or in the church, to select for use 
good sensible hymns of a general character, than to 
make full-grown men and women, who are earning 
their own livelihood, and as independent as yourself, 
sing infantine rhyme like so many charity children of 
eight years old in blue jackets and yellow breeches ? 

One great inconsistency in our ordinary hymnals is 
apparent in the insertion of psalms which bear hardly 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


165 


a resemblance to those of David, of which they profess 
to be metrical versions. We have before ns a volume 
of Dr. Watts, published in 1759. It is entitled ‘ The 
Psalms of David, imitated in the language of the New 
Testament, and applied to the Christian state and wor¬ 
ship. By I. Watts, D.D.’ This is a title-page which 
is perfectly honest and true, and it would be well if all 
compilers of hymn-books were as conscientious in this 
matter as Dr. Watts. ‘ What are called the metrical 
psalms,’ writes Mr. Mercer, ‘ have not a distinct position 
assigned them (in his book), but are incorporated with 
the metrical hymns, for, strictly speaking, that is their 
proper designation. Certainly, in their present frag¬ 
mentary and mutilated state they have no claim to be 
called “ the Psalms of Davidyet, as metrical hymns* 
many of them are admirable, and well fitted for choral 
purposes.’* Whether Mr. Mercer’s arrangement be 
judicious may admit of question ; but there can be no 
doubt whatever that if a psalm be inserted as such in 
any hymnal, it ought to appear with its real face, and 
not in masquerade. 

If the experience of the past would lead us to a cer¬ 
tain decision upon any given question, it must leave us 
in no doubt whatever that a successful versification of 
the Psalms as a whole is a moral and poetic impossi¬ 
bility. Sternhold and Hopkins, with Tate and Brady, 

* The Church Psalter and Hymn BooJc, §c., <$rc., by the Bey. 
William Mercer, M.A., Incumbent of St. George’s, Sheffield, 
assisted by John Goss, Esq., Organist of St. Paul’s Cathedral, 
London.— Preface. 


166 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


have borne much: they have been ridiculed in paro¬ 
dies,* and abused in prose: but try your hands, ye 
jokers and critics, and let us see how far you can suc¬ 
ceed in a translation. ‘The New Version, as it has 
been called,’ writes Archdeacon Hare, ‘ has been singu¬ 
larly successful in stripping the Psalms of their life and 
power. The diction is mostly of the tamest kind, trickt 
out with tamisht ornaments, and the poetical as well as 
the religious spirit of the original has almost entirely 
evaporated.’ f This is a common mode of writing, and 
not altogether without truth; and yet every fresh attempt 

* We once heard a person gravely assert that the following 
stanza was from Sternhold and Hopkins’s version:— 

The race is not unto the swift 
Nor him that fastest runs; 

Nor the battle unto the people 
That have the longest guns. 

Not but this will bear a comparison with a verse here and there 
in the old version. We have before us a Breeches Bible (1579), 
iu which is the following version of Psalm LXXIV., v. xii., by 
Sternhold and Hopkins:— 

Why dost withdraw thy hand abacke 
And hide it in thy lap ? 

0 plucke it out, and be not slacke 
To give thy foes a rap. 

The translation by Rouse, as it originally stood in the Psalms for 
the Church of Scotland, was similar. 

Thy hand, even thy right hand of might, 

Why dost thou thus draw back ? 

0 from thy bosom pluck it out, 

And give thy foes a smack. 

t Preface to Archdeacon Hare’s Selection . 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


167 


at versifying the Psalms proves how much easier it is to 
ridicule previous efforts than to improve on them. 

Since the Reformation there have been at least sixty- 
five metrical versions of the whole Book of Psalms,* 
and they vvdio have adventured into the lists in less 
ambitious attempts are legion. And no vulgar minds 
are these which have disputed the palm with Sternhold 
and Hopkins, and Tate and Brady. King James I. 
tried his royal hand at the task ; Parker, Archbishop of 
Canterbury, and Bishops King and Mant, severally 
translated the whole book ; Bishop Hall, a small part; 
Sir Philip Sydney and his sister (the Countess of Perm 
broke), Bacon, Milton, Addison, were in turn bold 
enough to handle the harp of David, and strike it to 
modern measures; George Sandys, Patrick, Rouse, 
George Wither, Sir John Denham, George Herbert, Sir 
Richard Blackmore,| Dr. Watts, Merrick, Lyte, Keble, 

* See Anthologia Davidica, by Presbyter Cicestrensis. 

f ‘ He (Blackmore) produced A new Version of the Psalms of 
David, fitted to the tunes used in Churches', which, being recom¬ 
mended by the archbishops and many bishops, obtained a licence 
for its admission into public worship; but no admission has it yet 
obtained, nor has it any right to come where Brady and Tate 
have got possession. Blackmore’s name must be added to those 
of many others, who, by the same attempt, have obtained only 
the praise of meaning well.’—D.r. Johnson’s Lives oj the Poets. 

Jt was of Sir Richard’s version that the lines were written; 

He took his muse at once, and dipp’d her 
Full in the middle of the Scripture; 

What wonders there the man grown old did! 

Sternhold himself he out-Sternhold-ed! 


168 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


and Marsh) have essayed to pluck a leaf from the laurel 
croWn of the Hebrew monarch. But it may be confi¬ 
dently asserted that not one has succeeded. The fact 
is quite patent, that from the very nature of things it is 
impossible to improve any portion of the Holy Scrip¬ 
tures, or our beautiful Liturgy, by turning it into verse: 
it is an unnatural attempt to ‘ gild refined gold.’* 

We hear much in our day of the desirableness of an 
authorised hymnal for our church, as there is for the 
American Episcopal and Scotch Presbyterian churches. 
Something certainly may be said in favour of it, but on 
the whole we greatly doubt the prudence of such an 
undertaking. The general impression is, that our litur¬ 
gical fetters are already sufficiently stringent; and in 
the divisions of our church it would be a vain hope to 
look for unanimity in the choice of a hymn-book. 
The High Church party Would require a collection 
made up mainly of translations from the Latin and 
Parisian breviaries.f Now, some few of these are 
beautiful, many are objectionable; and it may be con¬ 
fidently predicted that a hymnal which for the most 
part consisted of them could never be popular among 
our people. The opposite party in our church would 
select hymns of a less objective and more experimental 
character. We must remember, too, that at intervals, 
not very distant, there are welcome additions to the 
hymnology of our country—for we do not absolutely 

* Many of Lyte’s compositions are very beautiful; but they 
are, for the most part, paraphrases rather than literal translations 
of the Psalms. 

f See Christian Remembrancer, LXVI. 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


169 


subscribe to Montgomery’s dictum, that ‘ the appearance 
of a genuinely good hymn is about as rare as that of a 
comet ’—and it would be a matter of regret that these 
should be excluded from our churches by the decree of 
authority. Besides, if we are to have authorised 
hymns, our cathedrals must have authorised anthems, 
and we must all have authorised music. We do not, 
therefore, think it expedient, even if it were possible, to 
enforce uniformity in this department of our church 
service. 

If—(writes a reviewer in the Quarterly, more than thirty years 
ago)—if, in the present state of ecclesiastical affairs, it should 
appear inexpedient to regulate this part of our service by law or 
by episcopal authority, yet, if a selection could be made which 
should meet the approbation of the rulers of the church, and 
emanate from the great organ of the establishment—the Society 
for Promoting Christian Knowledge—we are persuaded it would 
gradually work its way into most congregations ; and we trust 
that the candour and moderation of those whose views it might 
not entirely meet would admit the expediency of some sacrifice 
of their personal feelings or opinions, for the great and sacred 
end of promoting unity within the church.* 

We wonder whether the reviewer be alive to see the 
fulfilment of his suggestion. The Society for Promot¬ 
ing Christian Knowledge published a few years ago a 
collection of 1 Psalms and Hymns for Public Worship,’ 
but the sharply conflicting opinions that have been 
passed upon it confirm our belief in the impossibility of 
bringing all parties to aquiesce in one hymnal. At the 

* Quarterly Review, No. LXXV., October, 1828. Hymns, by 
the late Reginald Heber, D.D., Lord Bishop of Calcutta. The 
Christian Psalmist, by James Montgomery. 


170 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


same time we hardly doubt the fulfilment of the re¬ 
viewer’s prediction, that it ( will gradually work its 
way into most congregations.’ 

The publication has undergone some sharp criticism, 
and it is well that it should, coming out under such 
high authority. Mr. Gurney’s hints* for its improve¬ 
ment were not without their use ; but we regret much 
that he should have induced the committee to alter the 
line in Milman’s hymn from ‘ Gracious son of David,’ 
as it originally stood, to 1 Gracious son of Mary.’ It 
may be a foolish prejudice; it is not one in which we 
ourselves at all sympathise; but that which appears to 
many, however incorrectly, a Romish invocation, will 
ever act as a drag-chain on the circulation of the book.^ 
Mr. Pearson styles it ‘a very inadequate work.’ Does 
he mean in quantity or in quality ? We do not hesitate 
to say, and Mr. Pearson in another part of his essay 
admits, that one hundred and seven psalms, two hundred 
hymns, and thirteen doxologies, are enough for any re¬ 
quirement whatever. So far as the quality goes, it is, 
on the whole, one of the best compilations we know. 

* Hints for the Improvement of a Collection of Hymns just 
published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. By 
J. H. Gurney, M.A., Rector of St. Mary’s, Marylebone. 

f The hymn, as introduced by Mr. Mercer into the earlier 
editions of his collection, has for its refrain, ‘ Gracious son of 
David, hear.’ In its last edition, this is changed into, ‘ Jesu, 
born of woman, hear.’ Now, as Mr. Mercer acknowledges having 
received some judicious hints from the Dean of St. Paul’s, we 
may suppose this alteration to have originated in one of them; 
and we may almost conclude, that this is the form in which the 
author of the hymn is now not unwilling to see it. 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


171 


The psalms have been selected with the evident purpose 
of adhering literally to the original text. The hymns 
necessarily vary in quality, but of none need you be 
ashamed. We would exclude some half dozen of them, 
and add about as many others, if we had the arrange¬ 
ment of the work; * but, after all, this may be only a 
matter of individual taste. 

* H. 45 (Easter-day) is bat a meagre paraphrase; the same 
may be said of H. 50. H. 56 is Milton’s paraphrase of the 
136th Psalm; H. 24 and H. 58 are Watts’s paraphrases of the 
same psalm ; and amongst the psalms there are two versions of 
it, the one by Keble, the other N. V. H. 88 isa somewhat jejune 
paraphrase of the thirty-first p. by Dr. Watts. H. 152, altered 
from one in Tate and Brady’s supplement, is scarcely worth 
insertion. Hs. 98, 184, 185 are not good specimens of that 
peculiar kind of metre. 

Insert Byrom’s ‘Christians, awake;’ Mrs. Barbauld’s ‘Againthe 
Lord of life and light ’ (Easter-day); ‘ Hail, thou once despised 
Jesus’ (Easter-tide); C. Wesley’s ‘Bejoice, the Lord is King’ 
(Easter-tide); C. Wesley’s ‘Let saints below in concert sing’ 
(asaint’s day); Watts’s ‘There is a land o.f pure delight.’ 

[This article was written in 1860. Since that time the collec¬ 
tion has been considerably enlarged: it now contains 300 hymns 
and 25 doxologies, besides the psalms. We do not presume to 
say that the compilers have been influenced by our hints, but 
their ideas of fitness have certainly run in the same groove as 
ours. The hymnal is now beyond dispute a very satisfactory 
one. The chief fault we have to find with it is, that in a few 
instances better judgment has been yielded up to the tyranny of 
popular fashion or fancy. Why insert, for instance, those three 
translations by the Warden of Sackville College ? Dr. Neale in 
his Preface to the second edition of his Medieval Hymns 
expresses his thankfulness that among others of his translations, 
the two, Jerusalem the Golden and To thee, 0 dear, dear 
country, have been admitted into so many collections. For our 
own part, we are surprised that these verses should be admitted 


172 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


Having obtained a suitable hymn-book, your next 
desideratum is a selection of good tunes. The theory 
of church music has lately undergone a marked im¬ 
provement. If we go back a century we reach the 
commencement of a vulgar era in that species of sacred 
music which belongs in particular to our places of 
public worship. 

Modern collections of psalm tunes (writes Mr. Havergal) differ 
greatly from old collections. The efforts of modern editors, till 
very recently at least, have tended to obliterate all that is old 
and good, and to introduce whatever is new and bad. These 
efforts commenced a century or more ago. They increased as 
the century advanced. Till dissenting bodies began to publish 
collections of tunes, the many local collections printed by country 
churchmen, generally contained a majority of the old and good, 
but the plague of sing-song, glee-like, not to say, nothing-like 
productions, has spread into almost every part of the established 
church.* 

into any Hymnal whatever. "We have found them lately in 
several collections of sacred poetry for children—which is their 
appropriate place. The tune, too, entitled ‘ Alexander Ewing,’ 
which has been so popular as attached to Jerusalem the 
Golden , may be appropriate in the drawing-room; but, in our 
judgment, it is too treacle-and-watery for public worship. Then, 
we are surprised at the insertion of Cowper’s hymn, There is a 
fountain filed with blood —so extravagant in sentiment and 
uncongregational in tone. Again, in the 124th Hymn (sacra¬ 
mental), we would rather not have met with those somewhat 
perplexing lines — 

Vine of heaven ! Thy blood supplies 

This bless’d cup of sacrifice. 

Is it not well to avoid all ambiguous expressions?—1866.] 

* Old Church Psalmody. By the Eev. W. H. Havergal, M.A., 
&c. Prefatory Remarks. 




FOB CONG BEG A TIONAL W OB SHIP. 


173 


Since this was written a gradual improvement in 
church music has been going on. Some thirty or forty 
years ago it had no distinctive character at all. Whether 
it were the refuse of the gin-shop or the opera-house, it 
was still considered sacred music if it were sung in a 
place of worship. Generally speaking, we now take a 
different and more correct view of the art. It is very 
likely that ranting, rattling, jiggish melodies may suit 
congregations in a lively state of palpitation ; but the 
effect of all such music must be to adulterate sacred 
thought and sensualise devotional feeling. 

Sacred music must be sui generis. 1 It would seem,’ 
says Mr. Hullah, who has perhaps more than any other 
man laboured to inculcate the true principles of church 
music, and to diffuse throughout the country a thorough 
appreciation of them in practice,— 

It would seem to be a truth so plain as to need no demonstra¬ 
tion, that if the fine arts are to be brought to the aid of religion, 
they should put on a dress as unlike that which they wear in their 
intercourse with the world as possible. To confine the principle 
to one art, surely every one will agree that religious music should 
have a character of its own ; that whether it express strains of 
joy or sorrow—whether- the goodness of God be sung, or his 
mercy supplicated—the singer and the hearer should at once feel 
that they are not in the theatre, the concert-room, or the private 
chamber, but in the house of the Most High.* 


* Preface to his Psalter. See Hooker’s Eccles. Pol., v. § 38. 
The same rule of church music is insisted on by Dr. Crotch in his 
lectures, by the Rev. W. Jones of Nay land, and every other 
judicious writer on the subject. See preface to the Rev. W. H, 
Havergal’s Hundred Psalm and Hymn Tunes. 1859. 



174 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


If the architecture of our cathedrals differs from that 
of the warehouse, the baronial hall, or the humbler 
dwelling, no less ought the music of our churches to be 
distinct from that of the drawing-room, the opera, or 
the tavern. 

In these days a clergyman or quire-master can have 
no difficulty either in selecting a good tune-book or 
arranging his own in manuscript. ‘ If,’ says Mr. 
Hullah, after eulogising the compositions of Ravens- 
croft, i if there be a thing not wanted in English music, 
it is a new psalm tune.’ The two works of Mr. 
Havergal, his Old Church Psalmody , and Hundred 
Psalm and Hymn Tunes , Mr. Hullah’s Psalter , Hymn 
Tunes , by Chr. Ign. La Trobe, Dr. Maurice’s Choral 
Harmony , Mr. Mercer’s Church Psalter , in union with 
his Hymn Book , the Tune Book published by the 
Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, in con-, 
nexion with its Hymnal , are all excellent publications, 
in which the true principles of church music are fully 
recognised and all but universally adopted. The tunes 
they contain must soon entirely supersede in our 
churches the Calcuttas, the Lydias, the Mount Plea¬ 
sants, and the jigs generally of the last generation.* 

* [We. remember that the late Mr. John W. Parker, the editor 
of Fraser's Magazine at that time, had great misgivings about 
this Paper, from an idea that the subject was of limited interest. 
Prom the many letters however we subsequently received in 
reference to it, the question was evidently beginning to attract 
general attention. Since then—we say not -propter hoc, but post 
Aoc-r-the country has been' inundated with Hymnals, and their 
accompanying Tune-books. Dari passu with the Society’s Work 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


17 5 


It may seem a great hardship for the young lady 
fresh from her boarding school to have to join in a tune 

runs the collection entitled Hymns 'Ancient and Modern, com¬ 
piled apparently by Sir Henry W. Baker and others, with music 
arranged by William Henry Monk, of King’s College, London. 
This publication certainly takes somewhat high ground. The 
hymn for St. Stephen’s day, for instance, begins, ‘First of martyrs, 
thou whose name.’ Canon Wordsworth, feeling that this was too 
like an invocation of saints, has ‘ He whose name.’ We cannot* 
again, see the propriety of such a composition as that in reference 
to Mary Magdalene. The music generally is agreeable and 
attractive; but to us it wants the nerve and old Church character 
of Turle’s Collection. The work however satisfies many tastes ; 
and, if the Marquis of Westmeath’s statement in the House of 
Lords is to be credited, a million copies of it have been sold. 
The Congregational Hymn and Tune Book, by the Rev. R. R. 
Chope, has met with much less success than it deserves. The 
Chorale Book for England, the tunes compiled and edited by 
William Sterndale Bennett and Otto Goldschmidt, is perfect in its 
music; but as the hymns are nearly all translations from the 
German, it does not sufficiently embrace our popular English 
tastes to be admitted into public worship among us. The last 
edition of Mr. Mercer’s Church Psalter is almost a new work. 
Kemble’s Hymn Book, which has been in circulation for ten 
years, now comes out with Tunes attached, arranged by Samuel 
Sebastian Wesley. The music is good; but as a collection of 
hymns, we doubt whether this publication can hold its ground in 
the general competition for popular favour. The Rev. Mr. Hall’s 
Hymn Book, so well known thirty years ago as patronized by 
Bishop Blomfield, has been revived with an appendix, and with 
tunes arranged by ‘ John Foster, Gentleman, of H. M. Chapel 
Royal.’ The music seems to be good ; but we fear the old horse 
can hardly be brought to its wind again. We have also met with 
a publication, now in its third edition, entitled Tunes, New and 
Old, comprising all metres in the Wesleyan Hymn Book, Sfc>, 


176 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


where there is a note to a syllable and a syllable to a 
note—where flourishes must be eschewed, and repeti- 

compiled by John Dobson, and for the most part revised and re¬ 
arranged by H. J. G-auntlett, M.D. Contrary to our expectation, we 
found these hymn-tunes to be characterised by sobriety of tone 
and soundness of taste, quite unlike the rants we sometimes 
associate with Methodism, Indeed, it was said by the late Dr. 
Wesley, that these lively jigs were introduced into the Meeting 
House against the will of his uncles the Wesleys, but that John 
was carried away with the tide. The expression so often attri¬ 
buted to him, that the devil should not have all the best tunes, 
originated, we think, not with him, but with Howland Hill. This 
is not the first work of the same kind. There was a Tune-book 
published at the latter part of the last century adapted to the 
Wesleyan Hymn Book. It is called the Sacred Harmony, and 
was by C. T. Lampe, a composer of some eminence at that period. 
It was compiled at the request of the Rev. Charles Wesley. 
The book contains many excellent tunes ; and Novello acknow¬ 
ledges the use he has made of it in his preparation of the 
Psalmist. We have also additions to our hymn and tune-books, 
from the Rev. T. Davis, of Rounhay, the Rev. J. Robinson, of 
Settle, the Rev. Henry Parr, late Vicar of Taunton, and several 
others. We see, too, that the Rev. E. H. Bickersteth is bring¬ 
ing out a fresh edition of his father’s Christian Psalmody, with 
a supplement—a work comprising originally about nine hundred 
psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs—with appropriate tunes, 
selected and arranged ‘ by William Hutchins Callcott, an eminent 
musician.’ Of publications confined either to the music or the 
words, we have had a large increase. We have A hundred Psalm 
and Hymn Tunes composed by the Rev. W. H. Havergal, M.A.; 
The Church of England Choral Book, by F. Weber ; The Parish 
Tune Book, compiled by George T. Chambers, F.R.A.S., a very 
sensible and useful collection. Among hymnals without music, 
Sir Roundell Palmer’s Book of Praise stands out conspicuously for 
the care and accuracy with which it has been compiled. Dr. 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


177 


tions as a rule are devoutly exorcised; but listen to 
a thousand voices together, and you will at once per¬ 
ceive the grandeur and sublimity of such tunes as the 
Old Hundredth and Dundee, in comparison with your 
meretricious Lydias. Much, again, depends on the 
natural arrangement of your harmonies. We were one 
evening in a pew near to an elderly gentleman who for 
fifty years had been under the impression that he could 
join in the Old Hundredth, and never failed to sing 
lustily what he called ‘ the bass part.’ Now it happened 
that a fanciful organist had given the choir, which was 
a professional one, the tune with Novello’s arrangement, 
for that particular occasion ; and thus it sounded to our 
neighbour weird-like and strange. 1 What do they 
mean, sir ? ’ he exclaimed, loud enough to be heard at 
a considerable distance; 1 the men are drunk, sir ! they 
can’t sing the Old Hundredth, sir! ’ The musicians 
were perfectly sober; it was the Old Hundredth, 
drugged by Mr, Novello, that was tipsy. 

Kennedy’s Hymnologia Christiana is a very interesting work, but 
too large to be used in public worship, and containing composi¬ 
tions not adapted to that purpose. Hymns of Love and Praise, 
by John S. B. Monsell, LL.D., is an agreeable publication, but 
will not be adopted for congregational use. The Holy Year, by 
Canon Wordsworth, is very devotional, but never likely to take 
its place as a hymnal for public worship. The Canterbury 
Hymnal , by K. H. Baynes, M.A., is one of considerable merit. 
Then we have been favoured with Lyras in abundance and much 
neatly got-up sacred poetry, which are likely to give pleasure 
and to do good, but cannot with any consistency be admitted 
into the public services of any church.—1866.] 

VOL. II. N 


178 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


We would scarcely go so far as to say that a musical 
repetition must never be introduced into a tune; but 
if it be, let it have a force and a meaning. It is not 
unusual to hear the last line of a verse ranted over 
three or four times when the gist of the sentiment lies 
in the former part. And the evil is still greater when 
a line is divided, as it frequently i&—sometimes a word 
—exciting'the most grotesque images in the mind. One 
Sunday afternoon we joined a clerical friend in a visit 
to his school. He was by no means either a musical or 
an energetic character: indeed, to tell the truth, he was 
known by the sobriquet of ‘ Old England,’ because he 
‘ expected every man to do his duty.’ Our friend 
closed the school with Watts’s hymn, ‘Lord, how 
delightful ’tis to see,’ in which is the following verse: 
O write upon my memory, Lord, 

The text and doctrines of thy word; 

That I may break thy laws no more. 

And love thee better than before. 

The tune was a miserable one, called ‘ Job ’—as miser¬ 
able as the patriarch in his worst estate; and it required 

a division in the last line, so that the words ran thus_ 

‘ And love thee bet—and love thee bet—and love thee 
bet—ter than before.’ Now what was oUr consternation 
at catching a great hulking fellow telegraphing a buxom 
damsel on the other side of the room, and accompanying 
the sentiment, ‘ And love thee, Bet,’ with what he con¬ 
sidered a little pleasant pantomime, while ‘ Old England ’ 
seemed to be reposing in that state of dreamy self-com¬ 
placency which is Old England’s characteristic at all 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


179 


times! We felt a strong impulse to take Betsy by the 
ears, and bundle John out by the shoulders; but we 
contented ourselves with wondering whether John and 
Betsy or their spiritual guides were more to blame.* 

In order to make your singing congregational, observe 
this rule,—attach to each hymn and psalm an appro¬ 
priate tune, and be careful that as a rule the music and 
the words be not divorced-. We know instances where 
with an infinitude of pains the clergyman selects the 
pieces to be sting on the following Sunday, and the 
organist fixes to each any tune that may suit his im¬ 
mediate caprice. We cannot conceive a more injudi¬ 
cious plan. Endeavour, if possible, to associate certain 
words and ideas with certain music, so that the melody 
may never be dissevered in the mind from the sentiment, 
and it will prove a marvellous help in the furtherance 
of congregational singing. Mr. Dickson says that we 
can never have 1 congregational song ’ till both a hymn- 
book and the tunes for each hymn are unalterably fixed 
by authority.f We agree in his principle of linking 

* Many similar absurdities will be remembered hy those who 
have paid any attention to congregational singing. For in¬ 
stance,— ‘And my great cap—and my great cap—and my great 
cap—tain calls me hence.’ Again—‘ My poorpol—my poor pol 
—my poor pol—"luted soul.’ We have heard of ah Oxford man 
reading in the country for his * little go,’ and being saluted with the 
changes,—‘Cannot pluck me—cannot pluck me—cannot pluck me 
—from thy hand,’—when, like a Virgilian hero, he drew from it 
a propitious omen ; but we were never told whether the oracle 
proved true. 

f Letter to the Bishop of Salisbury , p. 25. 


180 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


together the words and the music ; but we see not how 
authority can do more than individual common sense 
in the matter.* 

The taste of your organist must influence the cha¬ 
racter of your congregational singing. It is a sad re¬ 
flection that your ranting organist, like your ranting 
preacher, is most admired by the mass of hearers. 
We have repeatedly heard loud praise of a performer 
for his wonderful execution on the instrument, when 
he had shown it by such feats as engrafting on his chants 
rapid passages from ‘ Rory O’Moore,’ or 1 Pop goes the 
weasel.’ Such a man may be efficient in an opera, but 
for church music he has no soul, nor can congrega¬ 
tional singing ever flourish under his guidance. He 
is destitute of devotional feeling. 

[* We know how obnoxious this rule is to organists gene¬ 
rally, but we are more and more assured that, wherever it is not 
adopted, there can be no hearty congregational singing. We heard 
the other day of a clergyman timidly expressing to his organist 
the propriety of such a course, when he was met by the answer,— 
‘ Why, sir, you may as well have a barrel organ! ’ We have 
attended churches lately where the Society’s Hymnal was used, 
but where tunes were sung which we had never seen in any 
collection. These might have been the compositions of the or¬ 
ganist, or they might have been taken from some of the numerous 
tune-books that have lately been published; but they were un¬ 
known to us, and evidently so to the congregation ; for the singing 
was confined entirely to the choir. And what else can you 
expect in such a case? On the other hand, take any of the 
hymns and psalms in which all join—say the Old Hundredth and 
Ken’s Evening Hymn. Would they have been so popular, and 
so universally sung, if tunes had been capriciously applied to 
them?—1866.] 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


181 


* Now,’ says Mr. Latrobe, very justly, * of all inanimate crea¬ 
tures the organ is the best adapted to portray the state of mind 
of the individual who performs upon it. If pride and musical 
foppery possess the seat of intelligence, the faithful instrument 
will be sure to proclaim it in the ears of the congregation. Every 
“fond and frivolous ornament” proclaims his conceit, however 
he may seek to smother it under high-sounding stops and loaded 
harmonies. A person accustomed to mark the style in which an 
organ is played cannot be insensible to the devotion or want of 
devotion of the performer—a fact worthy of the continual remem¬ 
brance of every organist.’ * 

1 What do you think of our organist ? ’ asked a clerical 
friend of us not long ago, after his service, and waited 
for an answer of approbation. ‘ My opinion is,’ was 
the astounding reply, ‘ that he is neither more nor less 
than a puppy! ’ and immediately the gentleman him¬ 
self stepped into the vestry where we were, with 
a doctor’s hat in his hand and a silver-headed cane, 
and an air of unusual self-complacency. 1 A puppy ! ’ 
said our friend, after he had left, 1 1 grant you that he 
is personally ; but what do you think of his playing ? ’ 
1 That he is a greater puppy in his playing than in his 
person, if that be possible,’ was our very ungracious 
reply. About half a year ago we heard a somewhat 
celebrated organist in a go-ahead city playing all sorts 
of fantastic tricks with one of Tallis’s sober anthems, 
when we ventured to inquire of him whether it would not 
be better to adhere to what was written. ‘O!’ said he, 
shrugging his shoulders, and turning up his coat-cuffs, 
‘ we go with the times here, sir ! we go with the times !’f 

* Music of the Church , p. 122. 

(f At one of our annual Church Congresses we heard a distin- 


182 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES 


We know not how far it would be possible, as Dr. 
Maurice suggests, to make the subject of music one 
branch of a university education.* 1 A schoolmaster,’ 
says Luther, 1 ought to have skill in music; neither 
should we ordain young fellows to the office of preach¬ 
ing, except before they had been well exercised and 
practised in, the school of music.’f Certain it is that an 
acquaintance with the art must be of eminent service to 

guished organist affirm oracularly that the clergy, from their 
ignorance and caprices, were the great obstructors of church 
music. Now, we do not altogether exculpate the clergy: nay, we 
are ungallant enough to fear that their wives are sometimes 
delinquents, by introducing tunes from the drawing-room piano 
to the church organ. But we are quite sure that the organist is 
as great a culprit as either incumbent or curate in this matter. 
His natural inclination is to be heard: he has no desire to have 
his refined touches drowned by a full flow of song. Whether he 
be conscious of it or not, his mode of conducting the musical 
department of the service has often a tendency to check and 
repress rather than encourage congregational singing.—1866.] 

* Preface to Choral Harmony. 

f Quoted by Mr. Hullah in his ‘Introductory Lecture’ at 
King’s College. . . We know not how far our bishops might 

be competent to examine candidates on such dark subjects as 
sol-fas, clefs, and semibreves. The bishops might undertake, but 
who would undertake for the bishops, as was asked of a certain 
foreign ecclesiastic ? We were once, after the consecration of a 
church, in the presence of one of our bishops—a learned and 
pious man—when he praised with a grave face the musical part 
of the service and singled out for special commendation one tune 
the air of which was precisely that of the Maid of Llangollen. All 
the while they were singing this flowing melody, we had 
been wishing the sweetly smiling maiden back in her native 
valley. 


FOR CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP. 


183 


the incumbent of a church either in the town or 
country. If the clergyman, the schoolmaster, and the 
schoolmistress take a pleasure in congregational singing, 
a very fair choir may be raised up out of the most un- 
propitious neighbourhood. Nor oan anything promote 
good feeling in a district more effectually than a union 
of various ranks in the effort to promote and diffuse a 
love of choral harmony and sacred song, While music 
is a uniyersal language, it has the incomparable quality 
of suggesting no topics on which people need disagree; 
at the same time that it affords enjoyment, it refines the 
taste, and elevates the moral tone of those who come 
within its influence. 

We can hardly estimate the beneficial effects that 
must follow from a judicious and extended cultivatiou 
of this art among all classes of our people. Good church 
music joined with good sacred poetry becomes a memory 
for life, and survives among the pleasantest associations 
that connect the present and the past in their electric 
links. We have heard our 1 young men and maidens ’ 
in crowded cities lightening their daily toils with sacred 
songs, where the poetry was such as to elevate, and with 
music and voice which would have been creditable to 
any choir. We have heard them enlivening their winter 
evenings at home with a concert of many family voices, 
and apparently happier in the exercise than the luxuri¬ 
ous opera-lounger listening to some foreign favourite. 
We have heard them at their church and schools pouring 
forth a stream of sound, blending and swelling like the 
rush of many waters. We have perceived that the 


184 


HYMNS AND HYMN-TUNES. 


sentiments and melodies of beautiful hymns have often 
returned to the mind, linked with many a softening 
association, when a life of struggle and perhaps spiritual 
forgetfulness is drawing to a close ; and we have some¬ 
times found that the recalling of such lingering impres¬ 
sions has afforded the only hope of awakening feelings 
of devotion that were once vivid, but are now almost 
dormant. And while good psalmody will ever attract 
our working classes to a place of worship, it must at 
the same time elevate the devotional tone of the whole 
congregation. We should rejoice, therefore, to see our 
church music and hymnology studied and improved 
more and more, not with the object of inculcating special 
doctrines or furthering sectional views, but with the 
broad catholic purpose of enlarging religious feeling, dif¬ 
fusing healthy enjoyment among our people, uniting class 
with class, and preparing our congregations here to join in 
that grand Hallelujah chorus of ten thousand times ten 
thousand voices hereafter, when every earthly sentiment 
and expression shall be lost in the one boundless, end¬ 
less flood of praise. 


185 


V. 

THE MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF THE 
BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE AD¬ 
VANCEMENT OF SCIENCE, 1861. 


If the British Association had been in scientific search 
of a contrast, it could not have succeeded better than in 
fixing upon Manchester next after Oxford as its place 
of meeting. The two cities are striking types of two 
phases of society; how distinctively marked, and how 
widely dissimilar ! Around Oxford are gathered the 
historic associations of many centuries. Kings have 
had their residence in its palaces; parliaments have met 
in its halls ; superstition has brooded over its towers ; 
martyrs have died in its streets, leaving a purified faith 
to revive and spread from their ashes; and from its 
colleges have issued forth the learned and the noble of 
our land—generals who have led armies to victory, 
statesmen who have swayed senates by their eloquence 
and wisdom, preachers who have stirred up the soul 
from its depths, and philosophers who have won their 
trophies from the deep mysteries of nature. Manchester, 



188 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


indeed, is not without its historic associations, but they 
are of a less romantic character : it is of ancient origin, 
but of modern celebrity. The conflict of armies has 
sometimes raged in its streets; but it is better known 
as having long been the seat of peaceful commerce. It 
is only however within the last century that it has risen 
to its great eminence, and achieved a name and a fame 
which have been carried by its ships and merchandise 
to the furthest comers of the world. In the very build¬ 
ings of the two places there is a striking contrast. On 
looking at those sombre colleges, our minds are carried 
back to the days of gloom and monasticism. Those 
shady cloisters and low windows and cell-like rooms tell 
of times and customs and phases of thought long past: 
they impress you with^a feeling of medievalism. The 
architecture of Manchester, on the other hand, is re¬ 
markable, but it is in direct contrast with that of Oxford. 
The warehouses are palaces, costly and highly embel¬ 
lished, decorated within and without, stretching along 
whole streets, and forming large squares, which in ar¬ 
chitectural effect may vie with any in the capitals of 
Europe. How different, again, is the employment of 
the people you see in these two cities. In Oxford the 
mind is concerned most with the abstract and the ideal: 
the philosophy, the history, the poetry of ancient times, 
as handed down in the languages of Greece and Rome, 
are the subjects over which the head becomes confused 
and the eye grows dim. The Manchester mind deals 
not with abstractions; it is employed only on the prac¬ 
tical business of life. It would turn from the dead 


THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861 . 


187 


languages as things to be most properly buried out of 
sight, and rest on the tangible productions of living 
industry and skill. The very faces of the men and the 
aspect of the streets in these two cities bear ocular testi¬ 
mony to these truths. Transfer the contemplative 
philosopher from Magdalen Gardens or Christ Church 
Walk, where he takes his daily airing, solving a problem 
peradventure, or reducing an argument to a syllogism, 
or weighing in his mind the ponderosity of a Greek 
particle; transfer him to the streets and squares of 
Manchester, and the bustling energetic men who are 
there in desperate pursuit of their calling would at the 
best sadly discompose his philosophy of thought and 
temper. How the old gentleman, dignified and corpu¬ 
lent, would be jostled in his walk, as though he were 
no more than some movable antediluvian petrifaction, 
even if he were not annihilated by an impetuous spring 
van, or rolled over bodily by the shot of a stout lurry- 
man as he was pitching his parcels from his vehicle 
into the warehouse ! Oxford is the embodiment of a 
stationary idea. Men pass their lives there in easy 
study and quiet contemplation, eating well-cooked 
viands, and drinking choice wines, and pondering over 
ancient folios. They dread change, whether in univer¬ 
sity statutes or national laws; they are well content 
with the present condition of things, and are ready to 
bring down Scripture on the head of him that is given 
to change. Manchester, on the other hand, is the type 
of progress; its watchword is Onward. Change it must 
have, whether its tendency be to reform or to deform. 


188 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


Manchester must ever be devising fresh laws and 
demanding more freedom—freedom of conscience, of 
controversy, and of commerce. Manchester must be 
still inventing and advancing, striking out new kinds of 
trade, and discovering fresh outlets for its manufactures. 
The Manchester train sometimes hurries on too fast, it 
is true, and rolls down an embankment with a crash; 
but even this is assumed to be better than for the wheels 
and springs to rust from inaction, and the carriage- 
timbers to rot in the rain and mire. 

Now we firmly believe, almost paradoxical as our 
assertion may seem on the first consideration of it, that 
Manchester is really a more appropriate centre for the 
gathering of our scientific men even than Oxford. 
What! you may exclaim in astonishment, the metropolis 
of cotton to become the metropolis of mind—where the 
atmosphere is an impregnation of sulphuric acid, tar, 
and coal-dust, and the rivers run ink and a decoction of 
logwood—where clouds are suspended overhead like a 
pall, and five days out of the seven drop, not fatness, 
but a solution of soot—where the eye is attracted by 
tall chimneys vomiting forth their volumes of coal-black 
smoke, and the ear is assailed by the rattle of machinery 
and the ringing of anvils—where the ledger is the book 
of science, and a knowledge of double entry is more 
coveted than a mastery over the subtlest investigation 
of Newton—where free-trade is the noblest of sciences, 
and money-getting is the noblest of arts—where the 
cotton-plant is held to be the finest specimen of vegeta¬ 
tive nature, and cotton-twist the finest production of 


THE BBITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861 . 


189 


human skill—where the merchant prince and the cotton 
lord think much of their ventures as they consign them 
for transit across the great deep, but care very little 
per se about the theory of tides or the influence of the 
magnetic pole—where— 

Thank you, thank you, my good sir. Now that you 
have almost ‘tired yourself with base comparisons,’ 
listen to what we have to say. Oxford was pursuing 
her investigations into the mysteries of mind, the 
subtleties of philology, the dark records of ages long 
gone by, and the disputed tenets of theology, a century 
and a half ago, as she is at this day, and we honour her 
for her discoveries in the regions of the immaterial and 
the abstract; but the mind of Manchester, in its com¬ 
bination of science and art, has been directed to the 
advancement of national wealth and greatness, and to 
the increase of social and individual comforts. Consider 
the changes that have passed over our country during 
the last hundred and fifty years. Of those which have 
contributed to our daily convenience and personal well¬ 
being, how few have^had their origin in our learned uni¬ 
versities ! On the other hand, how many in a greater or 
less degree have sprung either out of Manchester itself, or 
the trade that centres in and radiates from Manchester ! 

But without further preface, let us open the thirty- 
first meeting of the British Association; and the Presi¬ 
dent’s address, though it were not so intended, may 
supply us with some reasons in proof of our theory, that 
Manchester is entitled to a high position as the promoter 
of science in its application to the arts. 


190 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OE 


Assuming that the Committee of the British Associa¬ 
tion, when at Oxford last year, decided, not inappropri¬ 
ately, upon holding their next meeting in Manchester, 
then very gracefully did they select for their President 
Mr. William Fairbairn, LL.D., F.R.S., a good specimen 
of a Manchester man. Dr. Fairbairn entered the battle 
of life with no other advantages than those of a clear 
head and a- strong will; but these, as a rule, are more 
powerful auxiliaries than any which can be derived 
from the prestige of rank, w r ealth, or position. He is of 
Scotch extraction, and carries on his face every mark of 
the rugged hard-headed native of the North. He has 
raised himself into celebrity mainly by his powers of 
mechanical calculation and his experiments on metallic 
substances. His distinction is associated chiefly with 
the profession of the engineer, and his efforts have been 
constantly directed to the development of practical truth 
in constructive science by the patient induction of ex¬ 
periment. He has published several Works, which, 
being the result of his personal investigations, are of 
undisputed accuracy. The titles of his publications are 
a sufficient indication of their contents ; as, foif example, 
•Remarks on Canal Navigation; Application of Cast and 
Wrought Iron to Building Purposes; Account of the 
Construction of the Britannia and Conway Tubular 
Bridges; Useful Information for Engineers; A Treatise 
on Mills and Mill - Work; the article 4 Iron ’ in the 
Encyclopaedia Britannica * There are other treatises 

[* To this list we may now add a Treatise on Iron-ship Building • 
— 1866 .] 


THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861 . 


191 


which he has read before various philosophical societies, 
and which have been published in their records. He 
is at this time carrying on his experiments on the con¬ 
struction of metal plates for the most effectual resistance 
to the heavy rifled ordnance of the present day. The 
Queen’s medal was presented to Dr. Fairbairn this year 
by the Royal Society for his experimental researches in 
practical science, when the chairman, Major-General 
Sabine, paid him some graceful compliments. * Perhaps 
it may be said with truth,’ were his words, 1 that there 
is no single individual living who has done so much for 
practical science, who has made so many careful experi¬ 
mental inquiries on subjects of primary importance to 
the commercial and manufacturing interests of the 
country, or who has so liberally contributed them to the 
world.’ Mr. Fairbairn probably did not start in life 
with the presentiment that he would obtain the medal of 
the Royal Society, or be distinguished by the title of 
LL.D. honoris causa ; but it is quite certain that his 
honours have not spoiled the unassuming character of the 
man, or changed the native kindliness of his disposition. 

On the evening of Wednesday, the 4th of September, 
the session of the British Association was opened in our 
Free Trade Hall—a building so called rather from 
traditional associations than its present uses. It is now 
turned to account for any purpose whatever, social or 
political, secular or religious, when a sufficient attrac¬ 
tion is held out to draw, or to be likely to draw, a large 
body of persons together. The old plain building, the 
veritable Free Trade Hall, has been supplanted by an 


192 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


edifice of considerable architectural pretensions. The 
4 sweet voices ’ of corn-law leaguers have given way to 
the sweeter voices of Mrs. Sherrington and Mr. Sims 
Reeves ; the political performances of former years have 
yielded to the ventriloquisms of Mr. and Mrs. Howard 
Paul; and instead of some yeasty patriot frothing and 
perspiring for his country’s good, and out of his electric 
flashes summoning 4 thunders of applause,’ we find on 
the evening mentioned our townsman, Dr. Fairbairn, 
opening in a quiet unobtrusive manner a scientific 
meeting, in the presence of some three thousand ladies 
and gentlemen, and surrounded by men of deep still 
thought and patient investigation from many lands. 

The scene was a gay one; but the ladies will pardon 
us if on such an occasion we naturally turn our opera- 
glass towards the men of European reputation that 
surround the President. There we see veterans in 
scientific research, still hearty and vigorous in their pur¬ 
suits—such as Airy, Murchison, Brewster, Sedgwick, 
Sabine, Phillips, Owen, Hopkins, Daubeny, Willis, 
Miller, Crawfurd, Lankester, Belcher, Robinson, 
Hamilton, Wheatstone, Rawlinson, Sykes, Harris, 
Babington, Richardson, and a host of others. There 
is something very overpowering as you feel yourself in 
the presence of such an assembly. You have before you 
the embodiment of the collective science of Europe, 
Asia, Africa, and America. Novel thoughts chase each 
other through your mind as you gaze thereon. These 
men, who must be sublimated into the abstract and ideal, 
—how do they live, we wonder ? Have they wives at 


THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861 . 


193 


home ? Have they children ? Do they ever rock the 
cradle ? Do they condescend to mix themselves 
in the affairs of everyday life ? Suppose these walls 
were to collapse and extinguish altogether the lamp 
of science that is burning so brightly before us: 
how long would it take to repair the shattered argand, 
and re-fan the flame of knowledge to its present 
brilliancy ? At how much would you think it neces¬ 
sary, in a commercial point of view, to insure the lives 
of these wise men, if they were collectively in danger ? 
Such a question perhaps has never entered into the 
deliberations of the ‘ Sun Fire and Life ’ Directors. 
It is true, men’s lives are valued in our courts of 
law, and the price is deducted from railway dividends. 
A peer of this realm, a bishop, a dean, a member of 
parliament, a cotton lord, a railway director—each of 
these may be the subject of a jury’s assessment, be his 
worth much or little. But how value a man of science ? 
The broken leg of a cattle-jobber, or the dislocated knee- 
pan of a pig butcher, or the fractured rib of a butter- 
badger, may be worth forty pounds on an average ; but 
the head that carries in it the unwritten history of the 
pre- Adamite world,—at how much, Mr. Foreman, would 
you assess the damage if that head were smashed ? 
Awe-inspiring doubtless is the presence of this learned 
assembly; and yet, by degrees, as you watch the motions 
of these men, and see that they are but corporeal beings 
in coat, waistcoat, and trousers, your feeling of timid 
wonderment wears off. One of them you had pictured 
to yourself as constantly wielding the thigh-bone of a 
VOL. II. 0 


194 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


megatherium, as Hercules brandished his club; another 
you could only fancy as existing in the midst of variously 
coloured flames, chemically produced, like some awful 
stage impersonation; another you had figured to your¬ 
self as peering perpetually through a mighty telescope; 
another as stirring up metallic substances in a fluid state; 
another as reducing eternity to seconds by means of 
cabalistic letters and mathematical symbols. But after 
a while they come down to your own level as ordinary 
bread-consuming mortals. Indeed, we have found out 
that philosophers are not necessarily stoical ascetics, but 
oftentimes men of good appetites and sound digestions, 
of clear heads and stout viscera—men who love turtle 
in its real entity better than in its mock substitution— 
men who can not only discuss the organisation of the 
finny tribe generally in the deep waters, but in particular 
the appetizing qualities of turbot and lobster sauce on 
the mahogany—men who can analyse the ingredients of 
fluids and propound to you the laws of hydrostatics in 
the lecture-room, but do not object to enter upon the 
more practical test of imbibing moderately in the 
dining-room the juices of the grape in their several 
varieties, vintages, and flavours. 

We propound a question for the ladies—What is your 
opinion of the personal appearance of our scientific visi¬ 
tors as a whole ? When great names have been long fami¬ 
liar to us, we have a natural curiosity about the looks of 
those who own them. Are they handsome or plain, bulky 
or thin, awkward or graceful ? Philosophy, somehow, 
from the days of Socrates downwards, seems to have been 
associated in men’s minds with unprepossessing features, 


THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861. 


195 


though Aristotle is said to have been a dandy. 1 He is 
very clever,’ we once heard a man say of another. ‘ Yes,’ 
was the reply, ‘ he is quite ugly enough to be clever.’ 
We think however that the theory is falsified by the 
most prominent members of the British Association. 
Occasionally you saw a quaint set of features in union 
with a comical figure; but generally the philosophic 
faces were very pleasing. 

The President’s address was a lucid, carefully written, 
but at the same time unpretentious review of the pro¬ 
gress of science, especially of that department of science 
with which he is most familiar. He considered it more 
particularly in its application to works of practical utility, 
such as canals, steam navigation, machinery, railways— 
which in combination have multiplied almost beyond 
calculation the industrial resources of our country. Now, 
in so far as regards what is termed Applied Mechanics, 
Manchester need not yield to any other place in the 
successes it has achieved. 

‘ One hundred years ago, ’ says Dr. Fairbairn, 1 the 
only means for the conveyance of inland merchandise, 
were the pack-horses and wagons on the then imperfect 
highways.’* First of all probably the original track was 
beaten out by the successive tramplings of horses and 
men; then succeeded the primitive carriage road, follow¬ 
ing this path, which generally took the high ground, to 
avoid the undrained swamps and marshes, j Along this 

* Address. 

t From an advertisement in the Mercurius Politicus, April 1, 
1658, we find that stage coaches were then beginning to run 


196 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


ill-formed way heavy carriages lumbered slowly, with 
their wheels deeply sunk in rut and mire. By de¬ 
grees the highways were improved, straightened, macad¬ 
amized, and scientifically constructed, till thirty or 
forty years ago they had arrived at perfection for all the 
purposes of travelling ; and along their smooth surface 
the gallant stage-coach, drawn by four high-mettled 
thoroughbreds, dashed at the rate of twelve miles an hour 
to the lively march of the guard’s bugle. Then came the 
railway, with its train shaking the very earth by its 
motion, outstripping the swiftest race-horse, and never 
tiring in its speed. We have often stood on a hill-side 
—a small property of our own—along the great north¬ 
ern road, and marked the old pack-horse path, the 
original carriage road by its side, the scientifically 
constructed highway, and the railway, all within a 
stone’s throw—symbols of the several stages of progress 
and civilisation through which our country has passed. 

from London. From contemporaneous history however we may 
gather that the roads were what the Americans call * Corduroy/ 
Indeed, they can have been but little traversed by carriages for 
another century. In 1754 a ‘ flying coach,’ was started between 
Manchester and London; and, in the advertisement of the daring 
project, we find the following assurance:—‘However incredible 
it may appear, this coach will actually (barring accidents) arrive 
in London in four days and a half after leaving Manchester! ’ In 
the Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle , we find 
that he and his friends performed the journey from London to 
Scotland on horseback about a hundred years ago. In 1784, 
when Pitt, at the suggestion of Mr. John Palmer, of Bath, 
reformed the system of mail conveyance, the post-office coaches 
travelled at the rate of barely four miles an hour. 


THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861. 


197 


Facility of transit is at once the precursor and the 
corollary of enlarging trade. Thus canals began to be 
cut some hundred years ago, and increased gradually 
till they traversed difficult tracts of country, rose to 
seemingly impossible levels, and penetrated into appa¬ 
rently impracticable localities. 1 The impetus,’ says 
Dr. Fairbairn, 1 given to industrial operations by this 
new system of conveyance induced capitalists to embark 
in trade, in mining, and in the extension of manufactures 
in almost every district.’* Now, among the first pro¬ 
moters—if not the very first promoter—of this mode of 
carriage, was the last Duke of Bridgewater—the father 
of British inland navigation, as he is termed—an eccen¬ 
tric character, who left the gay world of London on the 
rupture of a love-match with one of the beautiful Misses 
Gunning, or, we may more properly say, the duchess of 
Hamilton; and reduced his expenditure to four hundred 
pounds a year at Worsley, that he might complete his 
daring undertakings, in conjunction with Mr. Gilbert, 
his agent, and Brindley, who was originally a millwright. 
Of this remarkable man we have neither biography,f 
nor monument, nor statue, though much has been said 
about his introduction to the company of the great Duke, 

* Address. 

f In The Lives of the Engineers, which is announced as nearly 
ready for publication, we see that Mr. Smiles will give us biogra¬ 
phies both of the Duke of Bridgewater and Brindley. [He has in¬ 
corporated many particulars of the Duke’s life in the biography of 
James Brindley. He has also, in some preceding chapters, given 
us an interesting account of our ‘ early roads and modes of 
travelling.’—1866.] 


198 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


Sir Eobert Peel, Dalton, and Watt, in our Infirmary- 
square ; but the monuments of his wonderful enterprise 
yet remain, and to him assuredly applies the inscription 
on the tomb of the great architect — 1 Si quaeris monu- 
mentum, circumspice.’ His canals—for they are yet 
called the Duke’s—still penetrate far away under the 
hill-sides—awful tunnels, which nevertheless our Queen 
has explored ;* his barges, or those of his successors, 
still bear the produce of his mines to Manchester and 
the surrounding districts, not certainly over pellucid 
waters, but over a fluid compounded of dingy and odorif¬ 
erous ingredients. He was a great man, and he did a great 
work in his generation. What would have been his 
sensations if, as he stood on the Worsley hill-side, he 
could have seen the first railway train rumbling over 
Chat Moss, and could have heard it, as it were, snorting 
and shrieking an unearthly defiance to all past projects 
of conveyance and locomotion !j* 


* The Earl of Ellesmere, writing before this event, says— 
‘Distinguished visitors have visited this curious nether world. 
The collective science of England was shut up in it for some hours, 
rather to the discomfiture of some of its members, when the British 
Association held its meeting at Manchester in 1843. Heads, if 
not crowned,destined to become so, have bowed themselves beneath 
its arched tunnels ; among others, that of the present Emperor of 
Eussia. The Due de Bordeaux is the last in the list .’—The 
Quarterly Review , No. cxlvi. 

f Only the other day we met with a lady, between eighty and 
ninety years of age, who recollects the Duke very well. She 
was a relative of one of his stewards, and a friend of Mr. Gilbert, 
his head agent. She prides herself on once having had, as a girl 


THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861. 


199 


And here we are reminded that from Manchester our 
present system of railway conveyance took its rise. ‘ I 
well remember the competition at Kainhill in 1830,’ says 
Dr. Fairbaim in his address, 1 and the incredulity every¬ 
where evinced at the proposal to run locomotives at 
twenty miles an hour. Neither George Stephenson him¬ 
self, nor any one else, had at that time the most distant 
idea of the capabilities of the railway system.’ Since 
that period, what a social revolution has been effected 
by it! Our country has embarked millions upon millions 
in the construction of railways; trade has enlarged 
itself with enlarged facilities of carriage and commu- 

of fifteen, a recognition from him at Worsley,—a very unusual 
occurrence, for he invariably turned aside when he caught sight 
of a female dress at a distance. She described him as a man of 
middle height, inclining to be stout, somewhat undukely, and with 
an aspect not unlike that of George the Third. He took an immense 
quantity of snuff; and consistently he was dressed from head to 
foot in a snuff-coloured cloth. He was never seen after dinner, 
except by some favourite agent, and he is said, like Cato of old, 
to have warmed his cold chastity every evening with mellow 
liquor of some kind. (Hor. Car. iii. xxi.) This agrees on the 
whole with what Lord Ellesmere has related of him in the 
Quarterly Review. He seems to have had some presentiment of 
the reign of railways. ‘ At a period,’ writes Lord Ellesmere, 
‘ when he was now beginning to reap the profit of his perseverance 
and sacrifices, Lord Kenyon congratulated him on the result. 
“Yes,” he replied, “we shall do well enough, if we can keep 
clear of those d—d tramways.” ’ It is clear that in 1796 he was 
not wanting either in patriotism or money. When Pitt started 
his ‘ Loyalty Loan,’ the Duke * tendered a draft at sight on his 
banker for £100,000.’— The Annual Register, 1796, quoted by 
Lord Stanhope in his Life of Pitt, vol. ii. p. 390. 


200 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


nication; national wealth has proportionately increased; 
the broad and unreasonable distinctions of society are in 
some degree broken down ; domestic comforts are placed 
more within the reach of the poor; distant places are 
brought near; intercourse is facilitated ; and the smoke- 
begrimed operatives of the town have their pleasant 
trips, and are enabled on occasions to bask awhile in 
heaven’s sunshine, as they gaze on the well-wooded 
hillside, the glittering lake and the green valley, or as 
they inhale the refreshing breezes that come from the 
‘ hoary sea,’—unthought-of recreations in olden time ! 

In the discovery of steam as a motive power, Lan¬ 
cashire, we know, had no share ; but in the application 
of this stupendous agency our county has a peculiar 
and pre-eminent concern. Beneath its surface lie coal 
beds in great abundance, which more than compensate 
the sterility of the soil where they are found. The 
southern division of the county, it is true, is almost 
destitute of iron, but it has a ready communication by 
rail, canal, and sea-coasts, with Warwickshire, Stafford¬ 
shire, Yorkshire, Furness, and Wales, where this 
metal is plentiful. Without overlooking our unrivalled 
water power and convenient sea-ports, on our coal beds 
and minerals, it may be asserted, rests mainly our 
manufacturing and mercantile supremacy. Then comes 
in mighty steam, the offspring of our coal, and the 
fellow-worker with our iron; and if we were not at the 
birth of the young Titan, we have given him plenty of 
employment as he grew up; we have arrayed him 
becomingly in his working dress ; we have invented 


THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861. 


201 


instruments by which he might labour, and improved 
upon engines by which he might labour more effect¬ 
ually. In our foundries he is engaged in wielding 
the hammer that would crush the granite rock, or 
driving the delicate lathe that polishes the finest steel. 
In the mine he toils unceasingly, lightening labour 
in that ‘void abysm.’ On our railroads he whirls along 
incalculable burdens almost without a strain on his 
powers. From our ports he carries forth our mer¬ 
chandise to every land, almost in defiance of the elements 
above and the great deep beneath. Consider the action 
of steam and machinery on cotton manufacture alone : 

When Arkwright (says Dr. Fairbairn in his Address) patented 
his water frames in 1767, the annual consumption of cotton was 
about four million pounds weight. Now it is about one thou¬ 
sand two hundred million pounds weight—three hundred times 
as much. Within half a century the number of spindles at work, 
spinning cotton alone, has increased tenfold ; whilst by superior 
mechanism, each spindle produces fifty per cent, more yarn than 
on the old system. Hence the importance to which the cotton 
trade has risen, equalling at the present time the whole revenue 
of the three kingdoms, or £70,000,000 sterling per annum. As 
late as 1820, the power loom was not in existence; now it pro¬ 
duces fourteen million yards of cloth, or, in more familiar terms, 
nearly eight thousand miles of cloth per diem. I give these par¬ 
ticulars to show the immense power of production of this country, 
and to afford some conception of the number and quality of the 
machines which effect such wonderful results. 

N<3r is the machine itself more wonderful than are 
the tools employed for its construction : 

When I first entered this city (says the President) the whole of 
the machinery was executed by hand. Now everything is done 


202 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


by machine tools, with a degree of accuracy which the unaided 
hand could never accomplish. The automaton, or self-acting 
machine tool, has within itself an almost creative power; 
in fact, so great are its powers of adaptation, that there 
is no operation of the human hand that it does not imitate. 
For many of these improvements the country is indebted to the 
genius of our townsmen, Mr. Richard Roberts, and Mr. Joseph 
Whitworth. 

And further on, the President alludes to the inventive 
faculty of the latter—a man who has raised himself from 
a comparatively humble position solely by his energy 
and skill: 

To Mr. Whitworth, mechanical science is indebted for some of 
the most accurate and delicate pieces of mechanism ever executed; 
and the exactitude he has introduced into every mechanical 
operation, will long continue to be the admiration of posterity. 
His system of screw threads and gauges is now in general use 
throughout Europe. We owe to him a machine for measuring 
with accuracy to the millionth of an inch, employed in the pro¬ 
duction of standard gauges ; and his laborious and interesting 
experiments on rifled ordnance have resulted in the production 
of a rifled small arm and gun, which have never been surpassed 
for range and precision of fire. 

The science of chemistry, again, comes within the 
special cognizance of certain departments of the Man¬ 
chester trade. Chemical theories on calico-printing, 
dyeing, and bleaching, seem to be yet somewhat crude 
and imperfect among us. Hitherto, our countrymen 
engaged in these trades have been guided more by their 
experience as colorists than by the study of chemical 
laws in the abstract. In France, this science in its 
application to calico-printing, has been constituted a 


THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861. 


203 


definite one in the government schools, and it has con¬ 
sequently made greater progress there than in our own 
country. Here however the subject is attracting more 
attention from year to year ; fresh facts are brought out 
from time to time on the nature of colouring matters, 
and the application of colours; and we doubt not but 
that the field of exploration, yet only imperfectly 
worked, will one day yield a plentiful harvest of 
discovery and of profit to the scientific analyst. 

It is this utilitarian turn of the Manchester mind 
which not unfrequently raises the sneer on refined lips. 
There is something ignoble in this unceasing pursuit of 
the useful, backed by the question, ‘ What can we make 
by it? ’ Well, be it so. This mode of thinking and 
acting, when carried too far, is of the earth, earthy : no 
doubt there is something more sublime and spiritual in 
the love of knowledge for its own sake. But this is 
not 1 human nature’s daily food.’ Men and women have 
to eat and drink, to be warmed and clothed, to be 
housed and bedded ; and in providing such rather im¬ 
portant items of hourly existence, Manchester has done 
good service. Come now, grumbler as you are, be 
candid and charitable; look around you, and see what 
you owe to our energy. As a husband of a stout wife, 
and father of six extensively dressed daughters, calculate 
what you would have had to pay in the articles of dress 
merely, if our Lancashire faculty of invention had not 
been exerted in cheapening their production. Each of 
those dear pledges of affection is enveloped from head 
to foot, from flounce to flannel, in our manufactures, 


204 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


which we have reduced in cost some five or tenfold for 
your benefit. Look around your drawing-room, and 
consider how much you owe to us for the quality and 
low price of much of its furniture. Your coals are 
cheapened through our means; your household expen¬ 
diture is reduced ; your travelling is facilitated ; your 
general comforts are increased. Enjoy then the benefits 
we confer on you, and be ashamed of your sneers. 

On the Thursday morning the sectional meetings 
commenced, and continued throughout the session with 
unabated success. They were as a rule well attended 
both by ladies and gentlemen, and the audiences seemed 
to take a lively interest in their proceedings. The 
several lecture-rooms were in the very heart of the 
business part of the city; and there seemed something 
like an incongruity in the scene, as flocks of scientific 
ladies and gentlemen were threading their way in pur¬ 
suit of knowledge in the midst of spring vans and loads 
of calicoes, as fat lurrymen were gee-who-ing to the 
interruption of learned conversation, and omnibus con¬ 
ductors were touting for sedate philosophers who would 
not respond. It was science among cotton bales. In 
this particular, we admit, Oxford presented a more con¬ 
sistent picture. The pedestrians you met there were 
habited in academical costume, moving along with classic 
step; its very streets were silent and decorous; there 
was not an echo to disturb the ideal. 

If we were to give the substance only of one half the 
papers that were read at the meeting, it would occupy 
volumes. We will merely touch on some of the most 


THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION , 1861. 


205 


noticeable. Mr. Warren de la Rue opened the mathe¬ 
matical section with a very interesting contribution ‘ On 
the Progress of Celestial Photography since the Meeting 
at Aberdeen.’ By improvements in that marvellous art 
he had succeeded in fixing the images of the heavenly 
bodies; in the case of comets however he had been 
entirely baffled. Professor Owen favoured the meeting 
with four or five short treatises on zoological subjects. 
Sir David Brewster contributed several dissertations on 
different phases of vision. Du Chaillu read two papers— 
‘On the Geography and Natural History of Western 
Equatorial Africa,’ and ‘ On the People of Western 
Equatorial Africa,’ which however did not give any 
additional information to that contained in his book 
of adventures. Mr. Crawfurd, the President of the 
ethnological section—and, we may be permitted to say, 
the most dogmatic of all the Presidents—delivered an 
address ‘On the Antiquity of Man from the Evidence 
of Language,’ in which he brought together a great 
amount of information, but deduced no logical conclu¬ 
sion whatever from his much elaborated premisses.* 


* [Is not this fashion of dogmatising on very uncertain 
data a growing infirmity among our scientific men ? No one can 
peruse carefully the discussions and treatises on this very subject, 
the Antiquity of Man, which is now so popular, without perceiving 
that .mere suppositions are reasoned on as facts, and that conclu¬ 
sions, apparently preconceived, are arrived at with unusual 
facility. We presume not to say how soon any definite hypo¬ 
thesis can be substantiated; but in the mean time we would ask 
our philosophers to keep in mind the saying of an ancient, that 


206 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


There was a discussion on Darwin’s Theory, introduced 
by Mr. Fawcett, to which hypothesis the same remark 
will apply. Darwin’s facts are well arranged so far as 
they go, but they do not prove his theory ; there is no 
logical link between the two. Dr. Daubeny contributed 
several interesting essays on botanical and chemical 
subjects. Professor Airy gave the result of his Green¬ 
wich observations on the laws of terrestrial magnetic 
force. In the mechanical section, there were some 
useful treatises produced, and discussions elicited, on 
such topics as Steam-ships, Artillery versus Arms, Iron- 
cased Ships, Experimental Targets, Iron Columns, 
Wrought-Iron Bridges and Girders, and Enlarged Pro¬ 
jectiles, in which debates the principal speakers were 
Sir W. G. Armstrong, Mr. J. Scott Russell, Dr. Fair- 
bairn, Captain Blakely, Mr. Vignoles, and Mr. Bateman. 
In the Economic and Statistical department, our own 
townsmen came out vigorously; and we had papers on 
the Cotton Trade, Printing, Bleaching, Manchester 
Improvements, Strikes, Co-operative Societies, Taxation, 
Sanitary Improvements, Education, the Census, Capital 
Punishments, and questions of a like character. 

The officials who have to decide on the papers to be 
produced, have doubtless a difficult and delicate task; 
and they fulfil it very satisfactorily on the whole/ Still 
we think they might have curtailed the list with advan¬ 
tage, striking off what was very obscure on the one 
hand, and what was only commonplace on the other. The 

‘ the very nerves and sinews of knowledge consist in believing 
nothing rashly.’—1866.] 


THE BBITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861. 


207 


Astronomer Royal in his opening address laid it down 
with his characteristic good sense, that 1 nothing ought 
to be brought before the meeting which could not be 
comprehended ipso facto by the majority of those 
present — that it was no use to bring complicated 
formulas, which could not be understood without a 
month’s study in a printed book.’ And yet he admitted 
his bewilderment when his eye met such a thesis as 
this,—‘ On the Canonical Form of the Decadic Binary 
Quantic.’ On the other hand, we venture to think that 
the importance of some of the essays would have been 
amply satisfied by their being read before the members 
of a local Athenaeum or printed in the Weekly Chronicle.* 

The lion of the meeting was unquestionably M. du 
Chaillu. The ladies were all inquiring, which is 

* [We remember that the committee of selection refused 
several papers, because they touched on religious or scriptural 
topics. We are not blaming the association for laying down the 
rule that such subjects are to be excluded, still less for adhering 
impartially to it. But why, at its meeting in 1864, make such 
an ostentatious — nay, vulgar—demonstration, as it appears 
to us, in glorification of Dr. Colenso, who was impugning the 
veracity of Holy Writ. If the rule of neutrality is not to be a 
dead letter, it ought surely to be maintained among honest men 
where the Scriptures are attacked, as well as where they are sup¬ 
ported. We should not say that the meeting at Birmingham 
(1865) has been a success either in the class of its subjects, or 
in the position of those that discussed them. As philosophers 
delight in laying claim to the character of impartiality, they 
ought to show by their conduct that there is a reality in their 
profession. An Association of truly learned men, in its original 
formation, may degenerate into a mere ‘ Young Men’s Mutual Im¬ 
provement Society,’ held once a year on a large scale.—1866.] 


208 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


Du Chaillu ? And then they were amazed to find that this 
gorilla-killer is a little thin man, who does not look 
very formidable after all. Yes, but his face had been 
bronzed by an African sun, his moustache was very 
black, and his accent was quaint and foreign, all which 
characteristics are so interesting. It is true there were 
Anti-Chaillu-ites of the male species, but they were 
silenced, of course. Then, we think Professor Owen, 
his chivalrous supporter, though not a handsome man, 
was next favourite with the ladies. His fine head— 
his modest, but cool, self-possessed manner—the 
interesting subjects he handles so well—are all in his 
favour. 

Professor Owen is a native of Lancaster ; he was edu¬ 
cated at the Grammar School there,* and there also he 
passed through his preparatory training for the medical 
profession. We are ourselves a native of the neighbour¬ 
hood of Lancaster, and Owen used to be a frequent 
visitor at our house in the holidays, as a friend of some 
members of the family who were our seniors; he is 
described as a rough, straightforward lad, without a 
particle of conceit in his composition. That he should 
then manifest no assumption of superiority, is reason¬ 
able enough; but that he should still retain the same 
unpretending character, after a course of unexampled 
scientific success, would be more remarkable, did we 

* The Rev. Mr. Rowley of Lancaster, who has now arrived at 
a very advanced age, can dwell with a lively recollection on 
having wielded the school-master’s cane over both Professor 
Owen and Dr. Whewell, Master of Trinity. 


THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861 . 


209 


not generally find that a consciousness of mental power 
is associated with a freedom from silly vanity and rude 
dogmatism. It is a vague sense of their own mental 
weakness that makes men arrogant and presumptuous. 
They are desirous of compensating for want of mind 
by confidence of manner. A near relative of our own 
had the control of a ducal mansion and property near 
Lancaster; and as the family never resided there, 
pic-nic parties were occasionally permitted to enjoy 
themselves in the grounds and to practise the patient 
art of angling in the fishponds. Professor Owen, long 
after he had acquired a name of world-wide celebrity, 
used to ask permission when he came down to Lancaster, 
to have an afternoon’s fishing in the old grounds; he 
would wend his way three miles, rod in hand and 
pannier on back, to enjoy himself doubtless; but not 
so much in catching half a dozen roach, with an occa¬ 
sional perch of some few ounces in weight, as in reviving 
old recollections and youthful associations, in sauntering 
through pleasure grounds linked with pleasing memories, 
and reclining under the shadow of some ancient beech, 
while a pert sportive dace might be making free with 
the bait of the great anatomist. He would delight in 
spending a solitary sunny afternoon, not reconstructing 
some gigantic skeleton from a few of its smallest relics, 
bringing together like the prophet in the wild valley 
1 bone* to his bone,’ investing them with ‘ the sinews and 
the flesh,’ and ‘ covering them with the skin from above,’ 
but forgetful of pre-adamite creation in the gush of 
youthful feelings long pent up, turning back the finger 
VOL. II. p 


210 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


of time, reducing the man into the boy, and revelling 
for a space in childish day-dreams. 

There were not many incidents of a salient kind in 
the sectional meetings. That interminable question 
about the ape’s hippocampus minor was again introduced. 
Owen, whatever he may be with the ladies, is not a 
favourite with many of his scientific brethren: he is 
charged with a provoking indifference to all theories 
that run counter to his own, even though a host of 
opponents confront him. When Du Chaillu had finished 
one of his readings, he was subjected to a somewhat 
severe cross-examination on his African knowledge; 
the interrogation however was not well received by the 
audience. In one of the sections an erratic associate 
got up and declared that he was permeated bodily by a 
powerful current of electricity—that it had burnt a hole 
in his flannel shirt and discoloured his watch. He 
pulled out his watch for inspection, and would willingly 
no doubt have pulled off his flannel for the same purpose. 
The President however on gravely examining the piece 
of mechanism, decided that it was in very serviceable 
order and not at all injured. The eccentric member 
did not consider that he met with becoming attention; 
so he issued a 1 proclamation ’ summoning a meeting in 
which he engaged to elucidate ‘ all the phenomena of 
nature; ’ but whether he achieved his arduous enter¬ 
prise we never heard. The only discussion of genuine 
liveliness was on the Patent Laws, in which Sir W. G. 
Armstrong, Dr. Fairbairn, Lord Wrottesley, Mr. Groves, 
Captain Blakely, the Eight Hon. J. Napier, the Mayor 


THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861 . 


211 


of Manchester, Lord Stanley, Mr. Aston, and Mr. Scott 
Russell took part. Whether new light was thrown on 
the Patent Laws we pretend not to say; but this effer¬ 
vescent debate proves thus much—that it is every-day 
needs which really come home to the heart—that our 
globe may revolve, comets burst on us, eclipses recur, 
and marvellous discoveries be made in the heavens 
above and in the earth beneath, and that all the while the 
mind moves serenely as the moon itself; but only 
enter that innermost shrine, that adytum , the breeches’ 
pocket or the bank-book, and the heart waxes warm, 
the face red, and the tongue voluble. What is there 
for dinner ? or, is there any dinner ? is a more pressing 
problem than, Who inhabit the planets ? or, have the 
planets any inhabitants at all? The argumentum ad 
crumenam is more powerful than truth. 

But the most popular entertainments of the week were 
the evening soirees and lectures in the Free Trade Hall. 
The large room had been elegantly fitted up and deco¬ 
rated with choice pictures for the meeting of the Asso¬ 
ciation; and when filled with some three thousand 
ladies and gentlemen, it presented a gay and pleasing 
sight, without any reference to scientific attractions. 
Then some of our best organists were engaged, and 
played at intervals selections from the music of our 
great .masters on the fine instrument which is in the 
hall. Here the ladies were at home; it might be a 
question how far they had been able to follow in the 
morning that paper 1 On the Theory of Glacial Motion ;’ 
but now the eye was fascinated by agreeable scenes, 


212 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


and the ear entranced with harmonious sounds, and the 
thoughts engaged in interesting conversation, without 
any anxious study or sense of mental perplexity. 

On the Thursday evening there was an exhibition of 
first-class microscopes, under the direction of the micro¬ 
scopical section of the Manchester Literary and Philoso¬ 
phical Society. In all there were some hundred and 
fifteen instruments with their respective curious objects 
—an unprecedented number to be collected under one 
roof. The Manchester Literary and Philosophical 
Society is an institution venerable in years and distin¬ 
guished in the world of science. Among its members, 
past and present, honorary and ordinary, we find many 
distinguished names; and discoveries have emanated from 
it of world-wide celebrity. The results of Dr. Dalton’s 
researches were for the most part first published in its 
memoirs; the original conception of his Atomic Theory 
seems to % have sprung from his essay on mixed gases.* 
We have the germs of Dr. Fairbairn’s future discoveries 
in some of his papers read before the Society. In its 
memoirs we first find an exposition of Dr. Joule’s re¬ 
searches into the laws of elastic fluids. There also were 
originally made known the results of some of Professor 
Hodgkinson’s experiments—to whose life of patient 
investigation and recent death the President made grace¬ 
ful allusion in his opening address. 

On the Friday evening, Professor Miller delivered in 
the Concert Hall a lecture 1 on the Spectrum Analysis,’ 

* Memoirs of Dr. Dalton, by Dr. Henry, pp. 24 and 62 . 


THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861. 


213 


a subject of considerable interest and some difficulty. 
We should despair of making it intelligible to our 
readers, even if our space permitted the trial; but the 
Professor, with his abundant illustrations, succeeded in 
leaving a general idea of it on the minds of his hearers. 
He traversed the path of discovery on this subject step 
by step, from the researches of Newton to those of 
Kirchoff and Bunsen, showing how these investigations 
revealed to us, not only something of the nature of those 
distant solar orbs which stud the firmament, but also of 
substances so minute as to have hitherto defied all the 
powers of analysis and the subtlest chemical skill. 

* What a wonderful triumph of human intellect it was,’ said 
Dr. Robinson, on proposing a vote of thanks to the lecturer, ‘ even 
to measure the dimensions of the sun; to pass over that vast 
field that separated him from us, and to weigh that great orb 
in the balance, and to say that it was of such a specific gravity l 
By the marvellous powers of sight—those powers which linked 
together for us distant portions of space—it might be conceived 
that we could pass over that enormous void ; but what a triumph 
it was to say that we could travel there with the understanding 
—to say that the sun was of such a magnitude, of such a gravity, 
contained such elements, was composed of such substances, and 
was a part of our system, bound to us by a community of 
elements! ’ 

On the Saturday evening the soiree in the Free Trade 
Hall might be termed magical without indulging in 
rhetorical hyperbole. Arranged in the central part of 
the room were nearly eighty telegraphic instruments, 
illustrative of the progressive improvement in their 
structure, and of their varieties as in present use. Mr. 


214 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


Grove gave a very instructive address of half an hour 
on the history of the telegraph, tracing the several 
steps of invention whereby it had arrived at its present 
completeness. Then messages were dispatched from 
the hall to distant parts, each of which received an 
almost immediate answer. Can you in your imagina¬ 
tion picture a scene of more lively interest ? The wild¬ 
est fancies of Eastern romance never came up to the 
reality as here brought before the eyes. A hall of 
magnificent proportions and size, splendidly fitted up, 
overcrowded with the representatives of beauty and 
fashion, of philosophy and commerce! the eye resting 
on fair faces, rich dresses, gay colours in motion, intel¬ 
lectual features, wherever it turned ! Then we hear the 
whirring of wires, the ringing of bells, the flashes of the 
electric spark, and the click of the telegraphic instrument. 
Next a message is despatched to St. Petersburg,—‘What 
is the time, and how is the weather ?’—and the reply is 
almost instantaneous—‘ Weather beautiful, sky clear, 
time 10*52, temperature 12^ degrees Reaumur.’ But 
this is not enough ; the question must be speeded on to 
Moscow, whence also comes an immediate answer. Nay, 
more—communication is opened with Odessa, and 
still further, with Nicolaief; and had not a violent storm 
intervened in some unknown locality, it would have 
been carried to Taganrog on the north-east coast of the 
sea of Azof. As it was, there were compliments inter¬ 
changed in sixty seconds between that hall and some 
bleak, dreary place 2800 miles away. It is with 
majestic power that the Greek poet describes how the 


THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861. 


215 


lamp of fire flashed from promontory to hill, from hill 
to shore, from shore to isle, from isle to watch-tower, 
skimming over ocean, and lake, and plain, till the 
message of the destruction of Troy was conveyed from 
the burning city to the haughty Queen Clytemnestra 
in her halls at Argos ;* there is something grand 
and graphic in the onward speeding of the fiery cross 
of Roderick Dhu; there is a spirit-stirring dash in 
Macaulay’s description of the telegraphic rousing of the 
nation by watchfires, when the Spanish Armada was 
expected on our shores; but all these poetic descrip¬ 
tions, beautiful as they may be—strained as the mind 
must have been to summon images from the realms of 
fancy to produce them—how tame are they in compari¬ 
son with such a scene as is here exhibited in fact, when 
the spark of heaven is made the messenger of man, and 
does his bidding at the speed of 200,000 miles—as much 
as eight times round the earth—in the space of a single 
second! 

On the Monday evening the lecture of the Astronomer 
Royal on the late eclipse was a great treat. What a pleas¬ 
ing impression does Professor Airy leave upon the mind, 
not so much from that unrivalled mathematical genius 
with which he is confessedly gifted, as from his affability 
and good-humour ! He seems to be a man who would 
adapt his conversation to the capacity of a child with as 
much genial kindliness as he would discuss some abstruse 
problem with the mathematician. His lecture was 
illustrated by a large orrery and numerous drawings of 

* iEschylus, Agamemnon, 1. 273—307. 


216 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


eclipses under every phase. He exhibited also very 
effectively the process of the polarisation of light. 
After the lecture, Mr. Warren de la Rue projected 
upon the screen the two photographs he had taken of 
the eclipse, which were singularly striking and beautiful. 
Professor Airy’s voice was too weak for a room so large 
and overcrowded; but they who could not hear from 
the distance kept quiet for the benefit of those who 
could. We have frequently witnessed speakers called 
popular, and who thought themselves somewhat, put 
down ruthlessly on that platform by an assembly which 
could not hear; but the visitors on this occasion main¬ 
tained a becoming and respectful stillness, and there 
was never the slightest prospect of the Astronomer Royal 
being Free-trade-hall-ed. 

We are here reminded of an incident preceding the 
lecture which is very characteristic of our people. In 
consequence of the crowded state of die hall no places 
could be obtained near the platform; but unluckily 
some gentlemen who were # perspiring in the crowd 
caught sight of a considerable number of reserved seats, 
empty and tempting. Now, Manchester hates mono¬ 
poly : the name of protectionist is an abomination to 
it : besides, monopoly in the Free Trade Hall! Gra¬ 
dually we observed a moving of heads in the direction 
of the reserved seats—a swaying about as if certain 
bodies were put under particular pressure: then ex¬ 
clamations arose, apparently of defiance between the 
propelling and the resistant forces : it was the question 
between anti-monopoly and police protection. All the 


THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861. 


217 


time the Astronomer Royal, who was on the point of 
commencing his address, looked down from his altitude 
with philosophic composure, as though he had witnessed 
such scenes before. At length the barrier gave way, 
and the anti-monopolists rushed into the reserved seats. 
We marked one brave combatant in particular, who 
took up a conspicuous position : he was round-faced, 
corpulent, and palpitating ; his white waistcoat and 
shirt-front were disordered; he hitched up first one 
shoulder and then the other, as though his braces were 
deranged; he moved restlessly even on the favoured 
seat, as though his trousers were not comfortable; he 
wiped his forehead convulsively with his white hand¬ 
kerchief; and he glanced defiantly on all the people 
before him, much as we might suppose Tom Assheton 
Smith did when the mob persisted in drowning his 
oratory, and he, desirous of changing the mode of dia¬ 
lectics, challenged the best man of the crowd to a fair 
stand-up fight. Our friend’s tumultuous emotions 
might perhaps subside under the oil of science, as the 
storm abated when the Ledaean star arose;* but we 
fear much that he would only enter imperfectly into 
the arcana of eclipses and the polarisation of light. 

The last soiree was as well attended as the preceding 
ones. There was on the occasion an exhibition of bo¬ 
tanical and zoological specimens, numerous and choice, 
contributed by the members of the Manchester Field 
Naturalists’ Society. This association is mainly in- 


* Hor. Odes, i. 2 o. 


218 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


debted for what success it has achieved to Mr. Leo H. 
Grindon, a local naturalist of considerable eminence, by 
whom a paper ‘ On the Flora of Manchester ’ was read 
before the Botanical section. The members during the 
summer months take Saturday afternoon excursions 
into the country by rail and otherwise ; and as ladies 
are of the company, we may conclude that the trips are 
agreeable, if not altogether devoted to science. How 
far all may add to their zoological knowledge and 
botanical specimens, we cannot say; but they will 
add to their health by breathing the pure air of the 
country, and they will share in' and diffuse a rational 
enjoyment. 

On looking back over the week’s session, a bystander 
might perhaps be impressed with the notion that but 
few new truths had been elicited, but few doubtful 
speculations cleared up, but few discoveries achieved in 
the limitless region of the unknown. Be it remembered, 
however, that the process of discovery is a tardy one: 
the whole science of physics is one of induction ; and 
this procedure is slow, if it is to be sure. The meta¬ 
physical and moral sciences have advanced but little 
since the days of Aristotle; nor is there any scope for 
their progression, from the very nature of their subject- 
matter ; but physical science has only been commencing 
its onward march in earnest within a comparatively 
recent period. The collective gathering of one year’s 
truths may seem to be small in itself, but it is so much 
added to the previously accumulated mass. The £ 71 - 10 - 7 -/ 7 /it; 
of the Greeks implies a step onward; and at every 


THE BEITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861. 


219 


meeting of the British Association there is some further 
advance into the Cimmerian region of the undiscovered— 
some higher stand-point taken in the atmosphere of 
knowledge—some observable ascent into the dark defiles 
and mountain fastnesses of nature. Consider, not how 
much one year or one session has brought to light, but 
how much has been recovered from obscurity since the 
formation of the society. If but a few shells yearly be 
picked up by the side of the great ocean Truth, the 
museum is enlarging silently and gradually ; and we 
are permitted to inspect at our leisure those articles of 
rarity which have cost the philosopher so much labour, 
anxiety, and time in the search. 

The museum of inductive truth is now co-extensive 
with the world. Philosophers pass away; but their 
contributions to this world-wide exposition of facts 
remain behind. Particular languages are so generally 
intelligible, that a discovery in one tongue becomes a 
discovery among all civilised nations. Intercourse 
between the ends of the earth is now so comparatively 
easy and rapid, that the knowledge of one hemisphere 
is equally shared by the other. Discoveries may be 
concealed for a time ; the spread of invention may for 
a while be restricted by laws; but the truth developed 
by the individual soon becomes the property of the 
world. And more than all, science is indebted for its 
duration to one of its own offspring, the marvellous art 
of printing. Without this, we could have no guarantee 
but that in the lapse of ages, or the devastation of king¬ 
doms, or political revolutions, or national decay, arts 


220 


MEETING IN MANCHESTER OF 


might perish and knowledge vanish away. It has been 
so in former times. The literary products of mighty 
minds have crumbled away and gone for ever; the 
light of discovery has been re-clouded; science, in some 
of its departments, has gone out, leaving succeeding 
generations darker than their predecessors; inventions 
have been lost, and been revived after the lapse of 
ages; specimens of art have come down to us from 
remote antiquity, which baffle the ingenuity of the 
nineteenth century and defy our attempts at imitation. 
But this gradual extinction of the lamp of knowledge 
cannot be apprehended now. The known is stereotyped 
in many indelible forms, and, so far from being station¬ 
ary, is borne over land and sea, to be reproduced in 
every quarter of the globe, and to endure, we may sup¬ 
pose, so long as the earth itself shall endure. 

To some minds there is a justifiable cause for alarm 
in this intense love of investigation and this wide diffu¬ 
sion of knowledge. They are in perpetual dread lest 
the discoveries of physical science should come into 
collision with divine revelation. But while we advocate 
ever a reverential investigation into the secret things of 
the material world, we would venture to ask whether 
the very sensitiveness of such men, springing though it 
does out of a good motive, may not in its excess injure 
the very cause of divine truth which they are so anxious 
to maintain? There will be found no discrepancy 
whatever between the terms of revelation and the dis¬ 
coveries of physical science which the sincerest Christian 
may not willingly allow. It resolves itself mainly into 


THE BBITISH ASSOCIATION, 1861. 


221 


a question of words. A physical law may not be inac¬ 
curately, though it may be unscientifically propounded. 
Besides, it is not the purpose of divine revelation to 
teach the laws of physical science. Revelation, strictly 
speaking, is concerned only with matters above the in¬ 
vestigation of unaided reason: the hidden things of 
creation are properly left for the exercise of the reasoning 
faculties alone. Why reveal what is not essential to 
our eternal welfare, and what our intellect can suffi¬ 
ciently explore for any needful purpose ? Whatever 
statements are made in Scripture on natural laws are 
but incidental to the main design, and were clearly in¬ 
tended to be in consistency with the intellectual ad¬ 
vancement of the people to whom they were addressed. 
Could it have been otherwise ? Would not scientific 
explanations have been the means of darkening spiritual 
knowledge ? Should we not have suspected the 
genuineness of a writing which propounded certain 
minute laws of astronomy, for example, in scientific 
terms some thousands of years before they could have 
been comprehended ? 

Let science, then, pursue her course reverently, and 
we anticipate no results but what are good. Doubtless 
the great Creator, in implanting within us our mental 
faculties, has as surely intended that they should be 
exercised to the utmost of their powers, as that our 
bodily members should be brought into most serviceable 
use. It would be a contradiction to suppose that He 
who said, 1 Let there be light, and there was light,’ 
should forbid the creature to study the properties of 


222 MEETING OF THE BBITISH ASSOCIATION. 


that subtle, all-pervading, life-bestowing agent—that 
He who ‘ garnished the heavens ’ with their millions of 
shining orbs, should not allow us to carry our researches 
into the wonders of his surpassing handiwork—that 
He who formed the globe with its marvellous adapta¬ 
tions to human wants, should not permit us either to 
penetrate beneath its surface and trace out its changes, 
or dive into the secret recesses of the great deep, and 
out of all the secondary causes educe proofs of the 
goodness and wisdom of the first great Cause—that He 
who formed man, so curiously and skilfully constructed 
in bodily frame, and in spirit partaking of the divine 
effluence, should not be willing for us to apply the 
mental faculties of His giving, to investigate within our¬ 
selves the evidences of His designing hand and the 
extent of His creative power. Natural science in its 
very nature is progressive: the revealed word is un¬ 
changeable. Philosophy will carry on her speculations, 
sometimes rising upward like the eagle to the sunlight, 
and sometimes, like the eagle battling with the storm, 
baffled in her daring ascent. But the Word of God will 
remain the while unprogressive, unchanging, fixed— 
unmoved amidst the advances of human learning and 
the revolutions of earthly empires—not developing new 
truths, but guarding and perpetuating old and the 
greatest of all truths, the way-marks to a kingdom that 
changeth not—steady as the rock, while the stream of 

scientific speculation is sweeping onward at its base_ 

firm as the foundation of the everlasting hills—like its 
author, ‘ the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.’ 


223 


VI. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE, STUDIED 
UNDER SIR CRESSWELL CRESSWELL. 


Do not start, timid reader, at the term philosophy as 
applied to marriage; it is not our intention to enter 
into a discussion upon ‘love in the abstract’—a ques¬ 
tion on which Sydney Smith once heard a Scotch couple 
coolly engaged as they stood up to dance amidst the 
crash of a brass band. The philosophy of marriage is 
not necessarily the metaphysics of marriage. Alas ! 
how much power of thought—healthy, germinating, 
budding thought—has run to noxious weed on the 
sterile soil of metaphysics ! How much mental steam 
has been blown otf through the metaphysical safety-valve 
with no other effect than an unearthly shriek and a 
startling whistle ! The term in its philological deriva¬ 
tion, as Aristotle informs us,* signifies ‘after physics;’ 
the* concrete is of course the first in time, the abstract 
succeeds. Would it not have been possible to have 

* Aristotle’s treatise on metaphysics is entitled ruv t« 

(pvaixa. 


4 - 



224 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


postponed the latter sine die ? Could we not have 
dispensed with the whole tribe of metaphysicians since 
the world began ? They form no necessary link in the 
catena of animal creation. Are they subject to the 
same feelings as other human beings, we wonder ? Do 
they eat, drink, and get married ? Are they fathers of 
families ? Do they enlist into Volunteer Rifle regiments ? 
Or do they live in an atmosphere of mind, feeding on 
the light food of reflection and fresh air ? Happily they 
quarrel and fight; else we might take them for pure 
abstractions. Then what dogmatic, supercilious, patron¬ 
ising creatures they are ! We have had the honour of 
being acquainted with several; we have even shaken 
hands with Mansel; but they, one and all, seem to look 
down on you from their eminence of thought, as though 
they dwelt, like the deities of Lucretius, in some empy¬ 
rean of their own. One of them seems to say, You do 
not understand my theory of idealism; another, You 
cannot fully comprehend my system of consciousness. 
Very well: we admit that we do not quite fathom either 
your rationale of idealism or of consciousness; and what 
benefit would accrue to us if we did ? Would our 
perceptions be clearer if we understood all the operations 
of the human mind ? Should we be practically wiser 
if we could dive into all your mysteries about the 
wonderful first person singular, ‘ I ’ ? Of all subjects 
of speculation, that of metaphysics is the most barren. 
Great minds are ever engaged on it; but the issue is 
ever the same empty exercitation,—stale, flat, and un¬ 
profitable. The subject is old and dry as Adam, or a 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


225 


Scotchman, or a dust-heap in an east wind. We are 
now rusticating; and as we sit before our desk, we see 
a horse-breaker at a distance lunging his four-year-old 
in its gallant trappings round and round in an unceasing 
circle. The gentleman in corduroys with a long whip 
in his hand is a symbolical representation of the metaphy¬ 
sician. From the earliest days of Greek philosophy down 
through the learned times of the Roman Empire, right 
across the refinings of the middle ages, even to the Kan¬ 
tian speculations of Germany, Edinburgh, and Oxford, 
metaphysics has been trotting round the same circle in 
its gorgeous trappings without ever leaping its bounds or 
doing the slightest practical good to the human species; 
and so it will go on trotting round and round like a 
circus horse with a spangled lady on its back for the 
next thousand years, unless it come into collision a few 
years hence with Dr. Cumming’s Great Tribulation. 

Our philosophy then, be it understood, is a practical' 
one. We are a bachelor in declining years—-just old 
enough to study human nature with an insight tolerably 
clear and a temper reasonably crusty ; in other words, 
after having picked up some crumbs of experience in 
our way through life, we have arrived at an age when 
we are justified in setting up as a practical philosopher. 
For what is practical philosophy but an assumption of 
experimental superiority with a dash of bitterness in it ? 
We liave, like Ulysses, ‘seen many men and visited 
many cities; ’ we have buffeted with the world; we 
have ‘ had losses, go to; ’ we have had tender disap¬ 
pointments perhaps, ahem ! We are therefore entitled 

VOL. II. Q 


226 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MABBIAGE. 


to give advice to our juniors upon topics in general,and 
upon love and marriage in particular. A somewhat 
delicate and dangerous responsibility, we are aware, is 
that of giving advice to youths and maidens, especially 
on the subject of marriage. A young gentleman tumbles 
over head and ears into love, and he awakes in the 
morning finding that he and Fanny Larkspur have 
become engaged at the last night’s ball. He rubs his 
eyes and begins to calculate his income. He wonders 
whether he has acted prudently. Then he rushes off* 
to a practical philosopher like ourself, to satisfy his 
doubts and scruples. He merely puts the question, 
Shall he propose or not? He keeps out of sight al¬ 
together the fact that he has done so already, and been 
accepted. You dissuade him from the match; you point 
out to him how impossible it is to keep a giddy girl on 
300/. a year; you venture, in your zeal for your friend’s 
welfare, to abuse the lady; you call her insipid, ill- 
mannered, devoid of taste. Woe be to you ! Away 
he goes, and the same evening tells her all you said; 
and you have in her the bitterest foe that nature can 
compound, even to the day of your death. Should a 
young gentleman, then, ever come to you, with a pale 
face and flurried manner, and ask you whether it is 
advisable for him to marry any Fanny Larkspur, put 
this question to him at once—‘ Come now, Harry, tell 
me plainly and truthfully, are you not engaged to her 
already? Out with it like a man.’ Do not forget 
this caution, unless 1 in the nymph’s orisons ’ you wish 
your ‘ sins to be remembered.’ 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MABBIAGE. 


227 


But you ask, What business has an old bachelor to 
discuss the question of marriage? What experience 
has he had in the vicissitudes of wedded life ? What 
does he know of its delights and its cares ? Must he not 
be in entire ignorance of those numberless delicate inci¬ 
dents which arise behind the scenes matrimonial ? It 
seems little better than impertinence for an old cur¬ 
mudgeon who has lived all his life like a snail in its 
shell to attempt a treatise on the aesthetics of marriage. 
He may be a mathematician, a metaphysician, a poli¬ 
tician ; he may be an adept at all the isms and ologies 
of science; but the fellow deserves a whipping for 
poking his nose like a Paul Pry into the inner shrine, 
the penetralia, of married life. My dear madam, you 
look but on the surface of the question ; you skim over 
it, gracefully no doubt, but lightly as Camilla. We 
hesitate not to say that we are far better fitted to write 
upon the subject than your ‘ experienced ’ paterfamilias 
who has run half a century in matrimonial double¬ 
harness. Can such an one be an unprejudiced observer ? 
He must either be an uxorious moon-calf or a woman- 
hating misanthrope. But you know nothing of the 
mysteries of matrimony, sir. Indeed ! we know more 
than you fancy, madam ; the man that sees only with 
the outward eye is a fool. Then, we are not affected 
by petty incidents that distort the judgment. We take 
an enlarged view of our subject: we generalise upon it 
with the broad views of a philosopher. The man who 
has been compelled to rise from his bed on a winter’s 
night to nurse a squealing baby has surely enough upon 


228 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


his hands and in his ears without going beyond his own 
bedroom. If he had to write a treatise on marriage, his 
induction of facts would be limited and imperfect, and 
his conclusions narrow and inaccurate. He would lay 
down no general principles. His view of the matter in 
question would be simply, that matrimony was some¬ 
thing closely connected with disturbed rest and squealing 
babies. So would it be throughout. Your hen-pecked 
craven would consider it in connexion with domineering 
wives; the father of twelve children would treat it as 
something squally, as well as terribly anxious and ex¬ 
pensive. Each would write accordingly as the shoe 
pinched. You would not employ a corn-doctor to com¬ 
pose a treatise on the physiology of the human frame. 

Besides, is not the Professor under whom we have 
studied the subject—Sir Cresswell Cresswell *—a 
bachelor ? And a very wise act it was in Her Majesty 
to appoint an unmarried man to the judgeship of the 
Court of Probate and Divorce. We will answer for it 
that the Queen, with her enlarged experience, matured 
judgment, and sound common sense, did not fill up the 
post thus by mere accident. Sir Cresswell Cresswell is 
a free man, untrammelled by those cares and vexations, 
those delights and dalliances, which would be likely to 
warp and distort his judgment. He has no ugly preju¬ 
dices, no reminiscences, pleasant or unpleasant, to stand 

[* Since this article was written, we have had to lament the 
death of this distinguished lawyer and able judge, in the prime 
of life and in the vigour of intellect. The casualty that befell 
him will be fresh in the memory of most of our readers.—1866.] 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARBI AGE. 


229 


in the way of equitable decisions. He has no dread of 
a curtain lecture at night for dealing heavily during the 
day with some erring one who might have attracted his 
wife’s pity. Besides, a judge who has just left a scold¬ 
ing wife, depend upon it, does not assume composure 
with his wig. He would assuredly deal roundly with 
any such vixen whose conduct came immediately after 
under his adjudication. ‘ In the reigns of the Tudors,’ 
it is said , 1 the judges of assize rode over hill and marsh, 
armed to the teeth, from Carlisle to Newcastle, and 
avenged themselves for the fears and fatigues by the 
summary execution of whole batches of suspected male¬ 
factors.’* What could be more natural ? And might 
not a judge of the Divorce Court, who at the best is but 
a mortal man, after enduring a battery of hard words 
from his wife at breakfast, revenge himself on the same 
day by making havoc of some virtuous shrew who had 
yielded to no infirmity beyond the venial feminine one 
of an excitable temperament and a fiery tongue, and of 
sending forth her eirta 7 rrepoerra, like winged arrows, 
rather too briskly. Socrates, no doubt, was a model 
husband ; but would you have ventured to place him in 
Sir Cresswell Cresswell’s seat after an earwigging from 
Xantippe ? Or, take the more agreeable side of the 
question. View human nature in its more amiable 
aspect. Suppose the judge to be some Sir Coddle 
Coddle. He regards his wife as an angel clothed in 
flesh, blood, and crinoline. He never leaves her in the 


Quarterly Review, No. 213. The Homan Wall. 


230 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE . 


morning without a kiss, and an earnest request from her 
that he will be careful of his health. She assists him as 
he puts on his overcoat, ties a muffler round his neck 
with her own dear hands, and sees him safe in his 
carriage. Why, that man would be of a more than 
human type if he could act as an impartial judge. He 
would imagine that all wives were ducks like his own, 
and he would avenge himself on the drakes, who might 
be innocent and harmless. It is said that the whole 
creation of married men may be logically divided into 
two classes, the hen-pecked and the wheedle-pecked. 
Now, as a judge of the Divorce Court, if married, must 
come under one or other of these categories, it follows 
as a logical conclusion, that his perception would be 
clouded and his faculty of judgment distorted, when he 
ought to be administering even-handed justice. 

Then, with what a feeling of self-complacency will 
Sir Cresswell regard the cases that pass through his court. 
’Tis pleasant safely to behold from shore 
The rolling ship, and hear the tempest roar; 

Not that another’s pain is our delight, 

But pains unfelt produce the pleasing sight. 

’Tis pleasant also to behold from far 
The moving legions mingled in the war.* 

* Dryden. 

Suave, mari magno turbantibus aquora ventis, 

E terra magnum alterius speetare laborem; 

Non quia vexari quemquam est jucunda voluptas, 

Sed, quibus ipse malis careas, quia cernere suave est. 
Suave etiam belli certamina magna tueri 
Per campos instructa, tua sine parte pericli. 

Litcretius, ii. 1—6. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


231 


We do not acquiesce altogether in the philosophical 
dicta of the Epicurean poet; but if there be any truth 
in this passage, our present Judge Ordinary must be a 
happy man as he beholds the miseries of married life 
passing like gloomy phantoms in review before him 
from day to day. He sees at a distance the raging of 
domestic storms, and he hears the artillery of matri¬ 
monial warfare as he sits on his eminence of state, un¬ 
distracted and unbiassed. Then follow him to his own 
mansion after the business of the day. Will he not eat 
his dinner with peculiar relish, and sip his claret after¬ 
wards with the suave rnari magno feeling of the poet ? 
As he falls asleep in his easy chair, what strange dreams 
will disport themselves in his brain—wild, fantastic, and 
dimly pleasurable ! And when he retires to rest, will 
he not lay his head on his pillow with a sense of self- 
satisfaction that no other head is near—that he is not 
teased by frilled nightcaps—that he can lie abed longi¬ 
tudinally, diagonally, or curvilinearly, according to his 
own sweet will ? O, happy Sir Cresswell Cresswell 1 
After all, there is something perplexing to an outsider 
in the revelations of that Court of Probate and Divorce. 
It has disturbed our previous notions of conjugal felicity. 
We have begun to doubt the reality of our eyesight. 
Passers-by on a dark and cold evening, as they have 
witnessed from without a family party seated round the 
tea-table, with the fire burning brightly, have lingered 
on the scene as exhibiting a picture of happiness. 
People are now beginning to be shaken in their credulity. 
How do you know that the smooth-faced man who is 


232 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


shelling shrimps is not in the habit of turning the house 
out of the windows two or three times a week ? Are 
you sure that the lady who is handing round that cup 
which cheers without inebriating does not indulge in a 
more exhilarating beverage when alone ? May not the 
children, with their spindle shanks and frilled trousers, 
be rickety dolls, more fitted to suck lollipops through 
life than to engage in its warfare? We met a benig¬ 
nant-looking gentleman last evening at dinner, who was 
constantly addressing his wife across the table. * Was 
it not so, my dear ? ’ was the frequent question. 1 Yes, 
love,’ was the ready reply. Now we strongly suspect 
that no sooner had they entered their carriage than he 
began to pinch her arm till it was black and blue, be¬ 
cause she had carried on a lively conversation with a 
handsome fellow who w r as conspicuous for his figured 
waistcoat and killing moustache. Then, too, when our 
very pompous friends, who were married a few years ago, 
and have been blessed with two or three snub-nosed, 
dirty-faced children, come to us with their patronizing 
airs, and say, ‘ My dear fellow, do get married; it is the 
only happy and respectable style of life ’—we are not 
willing altogether to accept their statement as an axiom; 
we require something like reasonable proof. We call to 
mind the fox in the fable, which lost its caudal appen¬ 
dage in a trap. We suspect that there may be such 
4 helps to knowledge ’ as curtain-lectures in the back¬ 
ground. We become at once stoutly anti-caudal.* 

[* We suspect a quibble here upon the name of the famous Mrs. 
Caudle.—1866.] 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


233 


Why don’t the men propose ? Around this thesis we 
have observed that a brisk controversy has been carried 
on in one of our local papers. A disconsolate bachelor 
answers the question in one way ; Maria the Gentle in 
another. A father of twelve children enters the lists 
vigorously; a mother with six unmarried daughters is 
intensely earnest in the discussion; James the Grave says 
that ladies now-a-days are not trained to be good house¬ 
wives and mothers, but simply moveable wax dolls in 
expansive petticoats, set off with a slight knowledge of 
French and music; Fanny the Sprightly asserts that 
young men are mere puppies in these degenerate times, 
and think more of their moustache and rifle corps uniform 
than of the fair sex. Is it not strange that these keen 
controversialists should have overlooked this mumbo- 
jumbo of a Divorce Court ? What more likely to throw 
a wet blanket over an ardent temperament than a little 
cool reflection on those dissolving views in Westmin¬ 
ster Hall ? * It is true the consideration may have an 

[* On the publication of this article we received several 
anonymous letters in the handwriting of ladies. We give two as 
specimens respectively of the amiable and the unamiable. The 
amiable: ‘ Miss Flouncer, President of the Society of Flirt-abouts, 

presents her compliments to Mr.-, and begs to thank him 

for his very instructive essay on matrimony: it is the express 
aim of the members of the Flirt-about Society to get good 
husbands, and then to rule them with a mild but firm control.’ 
Per contra : * In “Fraser’s Magazine ” for this month appears Mr. 

--’s “Beasons against Matrimony.” His strictures on the 

Divorce Court we admit to be in the main correct, though it does 
not establish a decision against matrimony. It would have been 


234 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARBI AGE. 


opposite effect. Some may assume more unhesitatingly 
the connubial chain, from the knowledge that they can 
easily break it, if need be. Do not reckon however, my 
adventurous friend, on this easy mode of deliverance. 
Sir Cresswell Cresswell, in knocking off the vinculum 
conjugate , generally bruises the limb with his heavy 
blows. It is no trifle to come under this legal Vulcan 
with his ecclesiastical hammer. It is not every one who 
can endure the ringing strokes of the iron mallet with 
the unshrinking sullenness of Prometheus as the three 
armourers riveted him to the Scythian rock.* 

It must have been a startling sight to Cadmus when 
armed men sprang up suddenly from the seed of the 
dragon’s teeth and commenced a furious conflict. It is 
scarcely less astonishing to us that such multitudes of 
husbands and wives should rise up all at once before 
our eyes in fierce contention, and demand to be released 
from their matrimonial bonds. We always knew that 

better had Mr. -, instead of writing down matrimony, di¬ 

rected his pen against those who marry from mercenary motives, 
or, as is too frequently the case now, mere boys and girls, who 
enter the marriage state without reflecting, not on the “dissolving 
views in Westminster Hall,” but the solemn responsibilities of 
husband and wife. As a whole, the essay appears to us the 
effusion of either a disappointed man or a man void of natural 
affections; and we confess we envy not the man who can wrap 
himself up in solemn state, alike indifferent to the love and 
sympathy of woman; and, on the other hand, we should pity 
the woman who could trust her affections to such a Diogenes.’ 

‘ % my troth,’ madam, we may say with dame Quickly, ‘ these 
are very bitter words.’—1866.] 

* Prometheus Vinctus —opening. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


235 


there were mismatched gentlemen and ladies in our 
land; but who would have expected that there were 
hundreds of pairs struggling in their collars, like so 
many coupled pointers—snarling, snapping, fighting, 
and tumbling over each other in their eagerness to get 
loose ? Upon the propriety of giving to these unfortu¬ 
nates the privilege of dissolving their union we give no 
opinion: it hardly comes within the scope of our essay. 
Sir G. Bowyer declared that the Divorce Court 1 was 
becoming too scandalous to be tolerated. It was grow¬ 
ing into a sort of encumbered court for the transfer of 
married women, and instead of being a court for mar¬ 
riages, was in reality a court for adultery.’* 0 for 
shame, Sir George ! Still, in a modified sense, your 
statement is not altogether untrue. The Act establish¬ 
ing the court and system ought to come under the title 
of * Divorce made Easy.’ Women not long ago were 
sold in the marketplace with a halter round their necks, 
and the purchase-money was perhaps a few coppers, 
with a pot of beer for luck. This was done under a 
local system of divorce—a sort of Lynch law. Now-a- 
days, for a hundred-pound note apiece, men may change 
wives under legal sanction. In this age of clubs for 
everything, even for getting yourself comfortably out of 
purgatory, why not establish one for extricating unfor¬ 
tunate gentlemen and ladies from incompatible unions, 
subscription one shilling a month ? It would do a brisk 
business, we suspect, and afford a good living for several 


* Parliamentary Debates. 


236 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


hungry officials. Besides, is it not carrying out the 
principle of free trade ? In this our day we are met by 
the strange matrimonial phase,—that, while one set of 
couples is rushing in at the right-hand door, another is 
pushing out at the left. The ancient rhyme is likely to 
be verified: 

Marriage is but a rabble-rout, 

A hurly-burly din; 

Where all that are in wish to get out, 

And all that are out to get in. 

But as we purpose to consider the natural history of 
marriage, let us begin at the beginning. What is its 
motive cause ? In what principle or affection of human 
nature does it originate ? An easy question, you may 
say: love is the loadstone that brings two gentle hearts 
into sweet affinity. Well, it maybe so freq ,-jntly ; but 
your proposition is not a universal one. A few days 
ago, in answer to an inquiry after a certain article—not 
a wife—an old lady remarked to us, 1 You cannot get 
it either for love or money.’ We do not mean to resolve 
all motives into these two : still, we may conclude that 
money is a powerful loadstone ; and perhaps we shall 
not be far wrong if we class it with love as another in¬ 
ducing cause of marriage. This, it is true, is not a 
strictly logical division of motives: for love is subjective 
and money is objective. We might more philosophi¬ 
cally arrange the inducing causes of marriage into a 
love of the lady—for the gentleman is supposed to take 
the initiative—in her natural entity, and a love of the 
lady in her accidents, of which money is the chief,—an 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


237 


affection for her in her intrinsic qualities, and an affec¬ 
tion for her in those separable properties which gather 
round her in the shape of carnalities and creature-com¬ 
forts. If the Stagyrite had discussed the question, he 
would have told us that money is to be understood as 
not exciting desire for its own sake, but for the pleasures 
and possessions it enables us to obtain—such as splendid 
equipages, rich banquets, refined leisure, cellars filled 
with old wines, hunting-boxes, seats in parliament, 
foreign travel. We have not time to follow out this 
train of thought. As we are writing for the million, it 
may be enough to say that love and money are the 
principal impellent or attractive forces that bring to¬ 
gether the sexes, and guide them coaxingly under the 
matrimonial yoke. 

Love! Can we discuss a topic endless, boundless, 
unfathomable, in a single paragraph ? The number of 
volumes that have been written on it since the creation is 
incalculable ; and yet as a principle or instinct within us 
it remains involved in mystery. What is love ? Shaks- 
peare gives us the elements of which it is composed— 

Good shepherd! tell this youth what ’tis to love. 

It is to be made all of sighs and tears ; 

It is to be made all of faith and service; 

It is to be all made of fantasy, 

All made of passion and all made of wishes ; 

All adoration, duty, and obedience; 

All humbleness, all patience, all impatience, 

* All purity, all trial, all observance.* 


* As You Like It. 



238 VIE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 

In an old poem entitled 1 Alcilia’ (1613), supposed 
to be by John Chalkhill, the friend of Isaac Walton,* 
we find to what singular and varied sensations a lover 
may be subjected. Many persons perhaps take a love- 
fit as coolly as a head-ache. You may imagine the 
Tipton Slasher bewailing his crushed nose, but not his 
crushed affections: you may conceive a heavy porter 
groaning under the load of several hundred-weight, but 
not under the pressure of blighted feelings. Our author 
however was a poet, and poets are lovers by profession. 
Listen to him as he is just discovering that he is over 
head-and-ears in the tender passion :— 

What sodaine chance hath chang’d my wonted chear, 

Which makes me other than I seem to be? 

My dayes of ioy,- that once were bright and cleare, 

Are turn’d to night, my mirth to miserie: 

Ah, well I weene that somewhat is amisse, 

But sooth to say, I know not what it is. 

If it be Love to waste longe houres in griefe; 

If it be Love to wish, and not obtaine; 

If it be Love to pine without reliefe; 

If it be Love to hope, and never gaine; 

Then you may thinke that he hath truely lov’d; 

Who for your sake, all this and more hath proVd. 

I am not sicke, and yet I am not sound, 

I eate and sleepe, and yet methinkes I thrive not; 

I sport and laugh, and yet my griefes abound; 

I am not dead, and yet methinkes I live not. 

What uncouth cause hath these strange passions bred, 

To make at once, sicke, sounde, alive, and dead ? 


* The Philobiblion, vol. ii. p. 173. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 239 

Something I want, but what I cannot say; 

O now I know, it is myselfe I want; 

My Love with her hath taine my heart away, 

Yea, heart and all;—and left me very scant. 

Such power hath Love, and nought but Love alone; 

To make divided creatures live in one. 

But after awhile a change comes over his sensations; 
his love is not requited, and he escapes from its thral¬ 
dom. Hear him now :—- 

What thing is Love ? A tyrant of the minde, 

Begot by heate of youth, brought forth by sloth; 

Nurst with vain thoughts, and changing as the wind, 

A deep dissembler, voy’d of faith and troth: 

Fraught with fond errors, doubts, despite, disdaine, 

And all the plagues that earth and hell containe. 

Again :— 

Nay, think not, Love, with all thy cunning slight, 

To catch me once again: thou com’st too late: 

Sterne Industry puts Idlenesse to flight, 

And Time hath changed both my name and state: 

Then seeke elsewhere for mates that may befriend thee, 

For I am busie, and cannot attend thee. 

And soon, looking at the passion coolly, as philosopher 
and poet, he thus describes it: — 

Love is honie mixt with gall; 

A thraldome free, a freedome thrall; 

A bitter sweet, a pleasant sowre, 

Got in a yeare, lost in an howre; 

A peacefull warre, a warlike peace, 

Whose wealth brings want, whose want increase; 

. Full long pursuite, and little gaine; 

Uncertaine pleasure, certaine paine; 

Regard of neyther right nor wrong; 

For short delights, repentance long. 


240 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


Love is a sicknesse of the thought; 

Conceit of pleasure dearely bought; 

A restlesse passion of the minde ; 

A labyrinth of errors blinde; 

A sugred poyson, fayre deceit; 

A baite for fooles, a furious heate; 

A chilling cold; a wondrous passion 

Exceeding man’s imagination : 

Which none can tell in whole nor part, 

But onely he that feeles the smart. 

Where is its seat ? You place your hand on your 
heart, madam. Now, anatomists tell us that the heart 
in its material composition is incapable of all sensation 
whatever. Uncle Toby’s theory on this subject was 
unique, after he had ridden briskly from a visit to the 
widow. How much more poetic is the pillow prepared 
for it by the Greek tragedian !— 

Thou, Love, who sleepest through the live-long night 
On the soft couch of virgin-beauty’s cheek! * 

According to Cicero,I Aristoxenus the musician, dwell¬ 
ing on his fiddle strings, made love the result of a 
certain nervous tension. How far is this from the 
truth ? Shakspeare is more comprehensive and less 
definite. Listen to the moon-struck Duke:— 

How will she love when the rich golden shaft 
Has killed the flock of all affections else 
That live in her ! when liver, brain, and heart, 

These sovereign thrones, are all supplied and filled. \ 

* y E pus, .... 

os eV fiaKaKais irapeicus 
veaviSos ivvvxeveis. —Soph. Antig. 782. 
f Tusc. Quest, b. 1. c. 10. { Twelfth Night. 



THE PHILOSOPHY OF MABBIAGE. 


241 


A lady might perhaps be startled at such an expression 
of devotedness as this— f Allow me, for the remainder of 
my life, to dedicate my liver to your service ! ’ If Mr. 
Samuel Weller had used this formula, he would have 
added—‘ As the bilious genTman said to the brandy- 
bottle.’ 

If there be a mystery about the internal causation of 
love, there is less dispute about its outward evidence : 

A slight blush, a soft tremor, a calm kind 
Of gentle feminine delight, and shown 
More in the eyelids than the eyes— 

are £ the best tokens of love,’ according to a noble poet,* 
for whose memory, to say the truth, we have no great 
respect. Sophocles, though a married man with an 
unruly household, could yet describe the manifestations 
of the soft emotion : 

Love beaming from the eyelids’ fringe prevails.f 
Horace tells us that he was convicted of the tender 
weakness by his 1 languor and silence, and deep-drawn 
sighs.’| Hear Mr. Burke—‘When,’ he says, 1 we have 
before us such objects as excite love and complacency, 
the body is affected, so far as I could observe, much in 
the following manner: the head reclines something on 
one side, the eyelids are more closed than usual, and 

* Byron. 

f vik<$ 5’ ivapy^s fiAecpapau 

'tfxepos. —Soph. Antig. 795. 

J Conviviorum et pcenitet, 

In queis amantem et languor et silentium 

Arguit, et latere petitus imo spiritus.— Epodon, xi. 8. 
R 


VOL. II. 


242 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


the eyes roll gently with an inclination to the object; 
the mouth is a little opened, and the breath drawn 
slowly, with now and then a low sigh : the whole body 
is composed, and the hands fall idly to the sides. All 
this is accompanied with an inward sense of melting 
and languor/* In reference to this description, some 
might perhaps be inclined to say, with the madman:— 

Thou mayst admire how I could e’er address 
Such features to love’s work.f 

On looking up the last paragraph, we are appalled at 
the number of our quotations, and yet we have not 
half exhausted the stock of them that crowds upon our 
memory. From Anacreon to Ovid, from Ovid to Moore, 
from Moore to the last puling rhymester in the Lady's 
Magazine , we might make extracts, that would fill a 
volume, illustrative of the influence and might of that 
passion which is personified by a naked fat boy with a 
bow-and-arrow in his hand. ‘ 0 Love, invincible in 
battle ! ’J sings the Greek tragedian. Sir Walter Scott 
affirms that it 1 rules the court, the camp, the grove,’ 
and does many marvellous things besides. Some one 
or other apostrophises it three times as ‘ making the 
world go round.’ In one sense perhaps this is philoso¬ 
phically true. It may not affect the material gravita¬ 
tion of the heavenly bodies, but it impels to matrimony, 
and matrimony results in families; and so the earth’s 
surface is peopled with human beings, and the world 
turns round. 

* Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful , iv. 19. 

f Julian and Madalo. 

J ‘'E pus ayluare pax*!'. —Soph. Antig. 781. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MABBIAGE. 


243 


By the way, a quaint idea sometimes occurs to us on 
this matter. Suppose there was a universal resolution 
that there should be no marriage for a century, what a 
self-annihilation of the human race would ensue ! We 
do not recommend such a determination, because it 
would be a contravention of a divine command ; and if 
we did urge it, we suspect our advice would not be 
adopted. As a poetical idea, however, it might do good 
service. Campbell’s ‘ Last Man ’ is a sublime image; 
but fancy an old bachelor and an old maid as the last 
survivors of their race, walking about on sticks, totter¬ 
ing and toothless, snarling and scratching, patriarchal 
without posterity, and snappish without anything but 
cats and dogs on which to exercise their temper! 

And if love be powerful as a moving force, so also is 
money. Misanthropes call it the root of all evil. Effo- 
diuntur opes , irritamenta malorum. Still, most misan¬ 
thropes love specie, even though they hate their species. 
What indeed can we do without it in these days, when 
almost everything depends on the circulating medium ? 
We cannot take to feeding upon acorns, like our fore¬ 
fathers. It is certainly a will-o’the-wisp which now 
and then draws a poor fellow into the quagmire, but 
that is no reason why it is not in itself a thing to be 
desired. Only, if we had our way, we would decree 
that it should be more equally divided. We go on to 
our ’Change, and we see merchants who have returned 
as their profits for 1859 one hundred thousand pounds. 
Money seems to drop into their lap like ripe fruit; it 
scarcely requires the labour of gathering. Nay, if you 
r 2 


244 THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 

listen to the speeches of our traders, they do not seem 
to set wealth before them as their primary object. 
They advocate freedom of trade, it is true; but in the 
expansion of commerce they see more particularly a 
guarantee for the peace of nations. They form associ¬ 
ations for the cultivation of cotton in various parts of 
the globe, but that is with a view to the extinction of 
slavery and the civilisation of the peoples. 

Specifically in reference to marriage, money is no 
doubt an attraction. It is a melancholy reflection that 
it should be so. It would be much more pleasing to 
surround the rite with an ethereal atmosphere, and to 
suppose that the mind which was fixed on such a con¬ 
summation had taken leave for a time of all sublunary 
things, and revelled only in the spirituality of Platonism. 
But then men and women must live; corporeal beings 
cannot exist for ever on the spiritual; they must descend 
to solids, even to beefsteaks and dumplings. Are 
people to blame who, like Dugald Dalgetty, have an 
eye to the provant ? Sine Cerere et Baccho Venus friget, 
so says the proverb; and it is the more likely to be 
true, seeing that it is found in many languages. Our 
own edition of it is, ‘ When poverty comes in at the 
door, love leaps out at the window.’ Love’s young 
dream vanishes at the sight of an empty cupboard. 
Hence follow matches of convenience. Miss Pudsey is 
stout, slightly pimpled, red-haired, and with an obliquity 
of vision; she is somewhat loose in the arrangement of 
her dress, and in the allocation of her aspirates. Her 
parents at some remote period kept a pork-shop in the 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


245 


city; but this is a secret. She has, however, many 
golden charms besides her hair—she has an income of 
five thousand a-year unencumbered. Can the Honour¬ 
able Charles Montmorency do better ? He is one of a 
younger branch, idle, and out at the elbows ; he is far 
too fine a man to work for his living ; nature never de¬ 
signed him for anything so low and menial. He is 
handsome; and by the aid of his plausibility and 
moustache, his title of Honourable and his cab on credit, 
he succeeds in carrying off a lottery-prize in the person 
of Miss Pudsey. Per contra , Mr. Indigo Jones is old, 
wheezy, and asthmatic; he has spent much of his time 
in India; his face is yellow, and his liver is unsound. 
But he has a princely mansion, splendid equipages, and 
everything to match. Mr. Jones proposes to Miss 
Golightly, the belle of the locality, sparkling and effer¬ 
vescent as champagne. Well, she reasons, he is not so 
disagreeable an old gentleman after all; he is probably 
very manageable, if you go about your work in the right 
way; it may please Providence to take him before long, 
at which event I should be truly sorry ; still, it becomes 
us to be resigned under dispensations we cannot pre¬ 
vent ; at all events, I shall be mistress of Indigo Park. 
There we leave Mr. and Mrs. Indigo Jones. 

Following out the rationale of marriage, we come 
to the mode in which matches are made. Love and 
money are powerful motives, no doubt; but there must 
be a modus operandi in which they are developed. 
There are certain rules which are generally observed 
preparatory to the ceremony in this civilised age of 


246 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE’. 


ours. Mailed warriors and moss-troopers do not carry 
off ladies nowadays against their will, and marry them 
ex tempore. A remnant of such a practice, we are told, 
yet lingers languidly in Ireland. But, generally speak¬ 
ing, we make love according to formula, and marry in 
peace. 

Marriages are sometimes ‘ arranged,’ as the news¬ 
papers say. We fear the mercenary motive is often the 
prevailing one in such a case as this. It is not the 
clergyman who ties the knot here, or even the district 
registrar—but the lawyer, with his abstracts, title-deeds, 
and settlements. Master Slender was looking forward 
to matrimony as ‘ arranged ’ when he thus reasoned: 
i I will marry her, sir, at your request; but if there be 
no great love in the beginning, yet heaven may decrease 
it upon better acquaintance, when we are married, and 
have more occasion to know one another; I hope upon 
familiarity will grow more contempt ’ Sometimes we 
meet with instances of love at first sight, and marriage 
impromptu. The pair agree with the dramatist, that— 

Between the acting of a dreadful thing 

And the first motion, all the interim is 

Like a phantasma or a hideous dream; 

and so they banish the spectral figures at once by veri¬ 
table embodiments. Sometimes engagements spring out 
of romantic incidents. We have heard of gentlemen 
rescuing young ladies from a watery grave, and then 
leading them to the hymeneal altar. We ourselves 
knew a lucky fellow who was thrown off his horse and 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


247 


broke his leg : no great luck here, you may say; but 
he was picked up by a good Samaritan in the shape of 
a handsome lady who was driving by, and as soon as 
his leg was united, he himself was united to the lady, 
who was amiable and rich. Young clergymen again, 
and young ladies who are Sunday-school teachers or 
district-visitors, are in circumstances of great temptation: 
they go on doing good together and talking pleasant 
talk, moralising upon human joys and sorrows, analysing 
the feelings and affections of those around them, till 
they find themselves in love with each other without 
knowing how they became so ; the tide of tender emo¬ 
tion has risen gradually and imperceptibly to their 
throat, and they launch out upon the sea of matrimony. 
Then we see many falling into love because they have 
nothing else to do. 1 Maidens call it love-in-idleness.’ 
Young gentlemen and young ladies, for example, 
sojourning at the seaside in the summer months, must 
needs take up with the tender passion, simply to put on 
time. 1 A youth and a maiden,’ says Rasselas or Doctor 
Johnson, 1 meeting by chance or brought together by 
artifice, exchange glances, reciprocate civilities, go 
home and dream of each other. Such is the common 
process of marriage.’ Ladies fresh from the bathing- 
machine, with hair dishevelled, are to the poetic mind 
so many Yenuses rising from the saltwater — 1 sea 
Cybeles fresh from ocean ;’ and are they not interesting 
creatures as they are seen tripping from rock to rock, 
or stooping down in scientific search for 1 common 
objects,’ or promenading in the cool of the evening? 


248 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MABRIAGE. 


How far is Dr. Watts from being right when he says, 
that 

Satan finds some mischief still 
For idle hands to do ? 

Idleness and temptation are twin-sisters. Then follow 
marriage and a month’s elysium ! 

There is one way for the arrangement of marriages 
against which there seems to us to be a somewhat un¬ 
necessary prejudice—that by advertisement, we mean. 
We have a thorough disgust for those ruffians who are 
constantly playing practical jokes on these matrimonial 
advertisers. There can be no valid reason why such 
matches, arranged with discretion, may not eventuate 
in domestic happiness and worldly prosperity. How 
many young men in large towns are anxious to be 
married, but have never obtained admission into a 
circle of acquaintance from which a wife could be chosen ! 
And would you say that the Honourable Augustus 
Galopade has a more intimate knowledge of Miss 
Louisa Lovelace, so far as her real temper and dispo¬ 
sition go, than the rising young man of business has 
of the lady he is to meet through a notice in the Daily 
Express ? 

We admit that this mode of proceeding is something 
like 1 love at a venture,’ and we are far from recom¬ 
mending its adoption without the exercise of much 
judgment and caution. In one of our local papers we 
have observed from time to time these matrimonial 
advertisements, and we will give our inquiring readers 
a few specimens of them :—‘ A young gentleman, of 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MABBIAGE. 


249 


good family, disgusted with his experience as a bachelor, 
and anxious to escape from the obsequious blandish¬ 
ments of an intriguing mother and simpering fair ones, 
is desirous of forming a matrimonial connexion with a 
young lady of buoyant spirits, pleasant countenance, 
and agreeable manners; age not to exceed twenty; 
fortune dispensable, though not objectionable. No 
spurious communications from adventure-seekers will 
be entertained/ This may be classed under the cate¬ 
gory of ‘ bounceable and dangerous.’ Again, ‘ A young 
lady of fortune, with many personal attractions, well 
educated, and not yet twenty, is desirous of forming a 
matrimonial alliance. Address Amy, post-office, York.’ 
Is not Amy too delicious a creature to be genuine ? 
‘ A gentleman, of good appearance and domestic habits, 
age twenty-six, wants a wife; she must be good-look¬ 
ing, and approve of the volunteer movement. A little 
money will greatly facilitate matters.’ Here the young 
puppy is wishful to inveigle a fortune by the bait of 
his rifle uniform and 1 good appearance.’ ‘ A young 
gentleman of evangelical principles ’ is anxious to 
obtain a lady of corresponding sentiments and of good 
fortune. The lazy, prosy fellow is willing clearly to 
attend to the talking department while his wife provides 
the pudding. Of all such advertisements a cautious 
lady or gentleman will be wary ; but there is no reason 
whatever why a plain common-sense statement of your 
case should not meet with a plain common-sense re¬ 
sponse, and end in a happy marriage. 

What is commonly termed ‘ popping the question ’— 


250 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


the question—the question of all questions—is to most 
persons a formidable proceeding. It is an event much 
to be remembered. A lady looks back on it as an 
epoch in her existence; it stands out as a sort of beacon- 
light, attracting the eye of memory amid the dark night 
of the past. Did it take place in the drawing-room, or 
in the back-kitchen, or under the milkwhite thorn at a 
picnic, or by the seashore, or in a steamboat, or in an 
omnibus? You have not forgotten, madam, we will 
wager a fourpsnny-piece. But how do you advise me 
to proceed in this delicate matter ? a young gentleman 
perhaps is inquiring—nay, why not a young lady, for it 
is leap-year ? You must be guided by circumstances, 
we reply. Only avoid letter-writing, if possible: litera 
scripta manet. Your admirably-composed epistle, full 
of fervour and Tennysonian quotations, may be brought 
out of the cabinet forty years hence by the grand¬ 
children of the lady who rejects you, and paraded in 
the face of your descendants and of the world. Better 
go through the business orally. It may cost you some 
natural fears; but like Macbeth be, if not bloody , L bold 
and resolute.’ The hero of a hundred fights is most 
probably changed into a Bob Acres when he comes to 
the critical proposal. Mr. Thomas Sayers doubtless, 
who would jump into the prize-ring like a buck, felt 
fairly knocked off his legs as he offered his death¬ 
dealing hand to the object of his affection-. A mad 
fellow of our acquaintance once told us that he had 
snatched a victory out of the jaws of defeat on an 
occasion of this kind. When the lady had refused 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MAEBIAGE. 


251 


his proposal, he raised his eyebrows in token of surprise, 
and throwing a tone of injured innocence into his voice, 
he answered, ‘ Well, ma’am, and who asked you, pray?’ 
He thus caused a diversion in his favour, and, as he 
said, made a retreat worthy of Xenophon. We knew 
another youth who met with a strange misadventure at 
this critical juncture in life. He had fallen in love at 
Scarborough with a giddy harum-scarum hussy, who 
had nothing to recommend her but a glib tongue and a 
pretty face, simply because he had nothing else to do ; 
and he determined, like Master Slender, to 4 make a 
shaft or a bolt on’t.’ He was brave as a lion ordinarily; 
but his courage failed him here, and he resolved to com¬ 
mit his speech to heart. The dialogue between the pair 
ran as follows : — 4 Miss Boult.’— 4 Sir ? ’ ‘I had no idea 
three days ago ’— 4 Probably not ’— 4 no idea three days 
ago that I should have encountered such a shock ’— 
Was your tumble a severe one ? ’— 4 encountered such 
a shock to my comfort.’— 4 What on earth has happened ? ’ 
4 1 am not however without some hopes of relief’— 4 Dr. 
Potts is the favourite medical man here ’— 4 for the 
disease being of the feelings, like the spear of Achilles’— 
4 The feelings of Achilles’ spear! The filings, you 
mean’—‘like the spear of Achilles, the same object 
which causes the wound ’— 4 Homoeopathy ! ’—‘ the 
same object which causes the wound, may relieve the 
smart.’— 4 Homoeopathy and poetry combined ! ’ 4 And 
—land—and,’ he was going to add, 4 that object is Miss 
Caroline Boult; ’ when a rascally donkey-driver, with 
the organ of self-preservation strongly developed, es- 


252 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MABBIAGE. 


caping from the wheels of a carriage, rushed with his 
head against the lower part of our friend’s stomach, and 
caused the word that was trembling on his lips to issue 
in an elongated ‘ Oh ! ’ At that moment Mr. and Mrs. 
Boult approached; and as they had arranged to leave 
early on the following morning, the youthful pair parted, 
and to the best of our belief they never met again. Our 
friend, like Achilles himself, lamented the loss of his 
Briseis, by the shore of the * much-resounding sea ’ for 
one evening,— 

firj S’ anew irapa Oiva TroAv<pAoicr6oio OuAdacijs *— 

probably with a cigar between his lips ; but as he rose 
in the morning, the only remains of his love-fit was a 
slight pain in the stomach from the momentum of the 
boy’s head. 

What is it, we occasionally wonder, which gives to 
some men their fascination in the eyes of women ? Not 
long ago we read in the newspapers of a dirty, sneaking, 
ugly-looking Uriah Heap, who had married half-a- 
dozen wives in succession, and seemed, give him fair 
play, to have the whole female population at his mercy. 

* [Beside the many dashing ocean’s shore 

Silent he passed.—Lord Derby, Biad i. 34. 

Or perhaps as applicable to his melancholy condition might be 
the description of Achilles, * swift of foot,’ as he, 

plunged 

In bitter grief, from all the band apart, 

Upon the margin of the hoary sea 
Sat idly gazing on the dark blue waves. 

Lord Derby, Iliad i. 408.—1866.] 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MABBIAGE. 


253 


The Times accounted for his wonderful power of attrac¬ 
tion by the fact that he had published himself as a 
member of the aristocracy. This however is a coarse 
and unphilosophical way of solving the problem. There 
was evidently something about the man per se , as in 
the case of Sterne’s mysterious little Frenchman, which 
took with the ladies. It was not a handsome appearance, 
or any graceful accomplishment; was it a quiet sub¬ 
mission to their will—a deferential respect for all they 
said—a willingness to acquiesce in their slightest behests 
—a plying his suit assiduously but imperceptibly—an 
achievement of victory, like that of the Parthians, by a 
seeming retreat? We should have wished much to 
have studied that man’iS mind and character—to have 
analysed his idiosyncrasy. Though but a plumber’s 
assistant, he had a secret which Lord Chesterfield had 
never discovered. 

In discussing the question of marriage we abjure the 
dry statistics of the registrar-general. It matters little 
to us what is the annual number of “weddings in our 
country, or at what rate the population is increasing. 
We have no fondness for such details; it seems like a 
profanation of the sacred rite to pound marriage with 
the pestle and mortar of fractions. Nay, the registrar 
positively affirms that the number of weddings varies 
according to the cost of the quartern-loaf. Alack-a-day ! 
can that well-got-up youth with the demonstrative 
cravat, and that aerial sylph in white satin, who might 
be supposed to exist on a sublimate of nectar, be in¬ 
fluenced by anything so low as the price of flour ? We 


254 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARBI AGE. 


are beginning to feel a thorough disgust for those prying 
fellows who go about collecting small facts. A baby 
cannot be born without some intrusive official demanding 
to know whether it is a boy or a girl. If it should ever 
come to pass that we have occasion to tie up the brass 
knocker in a white kid glove, and we should see a rascal 
prowling about with a notebook in his hand, we vow 
solemnly that we will make an example of him. What 
business has Parliament to order any man to pry into the 
secrets of our family ? Has not every dissenter through¬ 
out our land been asking indignantly, What right has 
an inquisitive government official to meddle with our 
religious profession ? A fortiori , then, what right has 
he to meddle with our babies ? Cannot our lady have 
a boy or a girl as she pleases in peace, without being 
pestered by the inquiries of these statistic-mongers? 
We hold that such intrusion is an infringement on the 
liberty of the subject. It contravenes the theory that 
every Englishman’s house is his castle. It is an aggra¬ 
vation of the original sentence on woman. 

From the preliminaries of marriage we proceed to the 
ceremony itself. We know not what is the mode of 
linking a couple together in Scotland or in a registrar’s 
office ; our information is limited to the procedure as it 
is conducted in our Church. There the ceremony is 
essentially the same in all cases; but what a variety is 
there in its accessories ! What a difference is there, in 
the external aspect of the affair, between a marriage 
graced by a procession of ten carriages, and one between 
a weather-beaten farmer and his bride in a spring-cart, 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


255 


or that of a hard-handed collier with his dingy face and 
his sweetheart in gingham ! Then what fuss and bustle 
ensue in the vestry! With the farmer or the collier 
matters are arranged easily enough—a rude signature 
or a rough cross completes the registration; but what 
can you do when you have to bring up half-a-dozen 
bridesmaids and as many bridegrooms-men for their 
autographs ? What pretty little, simpering, sensitive 
ways are exhibited by the dear creatures! What a 
rustling of dresses is there on all sides! What efforts 
to pull off fast-sticking gloves ! What unlucky spots of 
ink fall upon the white kids! You may understand 
from all this, that there is reason in the apparently 
unreasonable custom of the Rev. Mr. Rubric being 
‘assisted’ by his reverend brother Calendar. Their 
five-pound-note apiece is fairly earned by their delicate 
tact in conducting the ceremony, and by their senti¬ 
mental speeches at breakfast. 

Now out of those very signatures a man of philoso¬ 
phical mind will derive matter for grave reflection. The 
bride’s hand often trembles, and her writing is conse¬ 
quently shaky. We generally consider this as an omen 
that she will not forget the promise of becoming obe¬ 
dience which she has just made. Sometimes the hand is 
firm, and the writing stiff and steady as an oak. We are 
here under a slight alarm for her future pliancy. Nay, 
we have seen strong-minded ladies who have rattled 
off their names like locomotives, and added a flourish to 
the last letter. Such an one always reminds us of 
Southey’s heroine, who brought to church in her pocket 


256 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARTI AGE. 


a bottle of water from the power-dispensing well of 
St. Keyne. But of all the instances of audacity we ever 
witnessed, the most surpassing was one exhibited by a 
hard-headed, impassive-looking lawyer: he actually 
took his office-penknife out of the pocket of his white 
silk waistcoat, and mended his pen before signing his 
name, as deliberately as if he had been at his own desk, 
muttering something at the same time about the impor¬ 
tance of a clean signature. Well, thought we, you are 
a cool hand, at any rate; we have a strong suspicion 
that you will be manipulating the carotid of your bride 
with that veteran of a penknife before your honeymoon 
is over ! And yet we have reason to believe that this 
stern lawyer, this devourer of widows’ houses, has 
faithfully fulfilled his promise of ‘ loving, comforting, and 
cherishing ’ his lady : we saw her not long ago, and she 
had six fat children and a double chin. 

Might we be allowed here, parenthetically, to say a 
word on the subject of vestries? In building a church 
why is this portion of it so little regarded ? Why do we 
so often find a magnificent edifice with a vestry about 
the size of a hackney-coach, and cold and wretched as 
a dog-kennel ? Cannot the stony-hearted builder fore¬ 
see that within the four walls of that room feelings and 
affections will well up from the heart’s fountain in asso¬ 
ciation with the most momentous incidents of human 
existence,—marriages, births, and deaths ? To go no 
further than a bridal party,—does it not seem a cruel 
thing to introduce into a cold, cheerless, dusty cell those 
whose hearts are palpitating with emotion, under a 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MABBIAGE. 


257 


covering of the finest lace and the most snow-white satin? 
We knew a Board of Guardians who selected a clergy¬ 
man, as the chaplain of their workhouse, from a long 
list of candidates, simply because he stood out from 
the rest for his rueful countenance, his sepulchral voice, 
and his lugubrious address. Was it not the act of men 
whose hearts were petrifactions thus wantonly to lay 
an additional weight of misery on the unfortunate ? 
And must not that architect’s disposition be chiselled 
out of his own granite who can suppose that a place 
which might be fitted for a coal-hole is good enough 
for a vestry, where every thing ought to be cheerful to 
the eye and animating to the mind, and not calculated 
to create deeper gloom and depression in feelings suffi¬ 
ciently fluttering and confused already ? 

But to return. Various as are the accessories of the 
marriage ceremony among us, there is the same sub¬ 
stratum of human nature underlying the custom, what¬ 
ever it may be. When our Princess Eoyal was 1 led to 
the hymeneal altar,’ she was attended by six, or it may 
be twelve, young bridesmaids from the most aristocratic 
families in our land, decked out in every ornament that 
money and millinery could provide. We pretend not to 
give an account of the ceremony ; for this we refer our 
reader to the Court Journal or to Mr. Phillip’s picture. 
We only allude to it as being a type of our aristocratic 
marriages. Now, if we go back three thousand years in 
the -world’s history, we find similar customs. Theocritus, 
in his 18th Idyll, is the Court Journalist, or Poet 

YOL. II. s 


258 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


Laureate who rejoices in singing the epithalamium of 
Helen. 

Twelve Spartan virgins, the Laconian bloom, 

Choired before fair Helen’s bridal room— 

To the same time with cadence true they beat 
The rapid sound of many twinkling feet, 

One measure tript, one song together sung, 

Their hymenean all the palace rung.* 

Take another sample from the bottom of the ladder 
of social life. In a former essay,j* we alluded to the 
unusual number of marriages celebrated at the Old 
Church, now the Cathedral of Manchester. We our¬ 
selves are acquainted with a Minor Canon there who 
for more than a quarter of a century has married thou¬ 
sands of couples every year. He is a bachelor, and yet 
he stands in loco parentis to as many of the human race 
as were drawn up in battle-array on the plains of Sol- 
ferino. If the Vicar of Wakefield’s principle be correct, 
that he is the most loyal man who raises up the most 
subjects, who is so loyal as our friend ? Why should not 
our Premier give him something good in the way of pre¬ 
ferment ? True, he has not 1 Honourable and Reverend ’ 
before his name. Well, never mind, my Lord, give a 
plebeian a turn now and then; falsify for once that ugly 
remark of a rude fellow about a certain ‘ gigantic system 
of out-door relief.’ If we were the dispenser of ecclesias¬ 
tical patronage—But we must not forget Johnny Green’s 
wedding, and his drive from Oldham to the Old Church 
at Manchester:— 

* Chapman. f Manchester, vol. i. pp. 118, 119. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


259 


Neaw, lads, where ar yo beawn so fast; 

Ye happen ha no yerd whot’s past ? 

Au gatten wed sin an’r here last, 

Just three week sin come Sunday. 

Au axed th’ owd folk, an aw wur reet, 

So Nan and me agreed tat neet, 

Ot if we could mak both eends meet, 

We’d wed o’ Easter Monday. 

That morn, as prim as pewter quarts, 

Aw th’ wenches coom an browt th’ sweethearts; 
Au fund we’r loike to ha three carts, 

’Twur thrunk as Eccles Wakes, mon. 

We donn’d eawr tits i’ ribbons too, 

One red, one green, and tone wur blue; 

So hey! lads, hey! away we flew, 

Loike a race for th’ Leger stakes, mon. 

Reet merrily we drove, full bat, 

An eh! heaw Duke and Dobbin swat; 

Owd Grizzle were so lawm an fat 

Fro soide to soide hoo jow’d ’um: 

Deawn Withy Grove at last we coom, 

An stopt at Seven Stars, by gum, 

An drunk as mich warm ale an rum, 

As ’d dreawn o’ th’ folk i’ Owdham. 

When th’ shot wur paid an drink wur done, 

Up Fennel Street, to th’ church, for fun, 

We donc’d like morris-dancers dun, 

To th’ best of aw meh knowledge : 

So th’ job wur done i’ hoave a crack, 

Bote eh ! whot fun to get th’ first smack! 

So neaw, meh lads, ’fore we gun back, 

Says aw, we’ll look at th’ College. 
****** 
Then deawn Lung-Millgate we did steer 
To owd Moike Wilson’s goods-shop there, 
s 2 


260 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE . 


To bey eawr Nan a rockink chear, 

An pots an spoons an ladles: t 

Nan bowt a glass for lookink in, 

A tin Dutch oon for cookink in, 

Au bowt a chear for smookink in, 

An Nan ax’d proice o’th’ cradles. 

Then th’ fiddler struck up th’ honeymoon, 

An off we seet for Owdham soon, 

We made owd Grizzle trot to th’ tune, 

Every yard o’ th’ way, mon. 

At neet oich lad an bonny lass, 

Laws ! heaw they donc’d and drunk their glass; 

So tiert wur Nan an I, by th’ mass, 

Ot we lay till ten next day, mon.* 

Now tell us, where is the essential difference between 
the wedding at Sparta and that from Oldham ? Was 
not fair Helen formed of clay very similar to that of 
Nancy Green ? The one may have been more of the 
porcelain order than the other; but the material elements 
of each were substantially the same. 

There is a Lancashire phrase, that 1 folks wed in 
haste, and rue at leisure.’ That is however as the case 
may be. Some couples continue through life to coo 
like turtle doves in duet; others soon-begin to cry with 
Sterne’s starling, ‘ We can’t get out.’ A newly-married 
pair are like two travellers in an unknown country; 
fresh views of each other’s disposition are opening out 
before them every day, some beautiful, some unsightly, 
and mostly unexpected. A breeze occasionally springs 
up which may either enliven the journey by clearing 


* Hone’s Year Book, 1832, p. 86. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. , 261 


the atmosphere, or damp the ardour of the excursionists 
by ending in a thunder-storm. In the second week of 
the honeymoon, say, Mr. Lovejoy is not sufficiently 
attentive to his lady as she is struggling through a style. 
Mrs. Lovejoy begins to pout, and ventures to suggest 
that she would not have been so treated a month ago; 
Mr. Lovejoy begs pardon, but in a half-reserved, half- 
churlish manner. The lady, who might hitherto have 
been made up of sunshine and sugar-candy—hewn out 
of that transparent confectionary called ‘ Indian rock’— 
is now slightly obscured by the shadow of a cloud, and 
manifests symptoms of acidity in her composition. The 
gentleman, who for the last twelve months has been 
laying his heart at the lady’s feet, begins to think that 
he might as well keep it under his waistcoat. We next 
see them walking side by side in silence, each a very 
ill-used being; but by degrees the sun breaks through 
the cloud again, and the fear is, lest they rush for a time 
into a more ardent affection than ever. The weather 
may be marked now as ‘ changeable ; ’ but by degrees 
it will become more settled. If any couple have ordi¬ 
nary judgment, they will so arrange their differences 
and dovetail their likings and dislikings as to jog on 
together agreeably on the whole. The cant of incom¬ 
patibility of temper is for the most part the excuse of 
knaves or fools. 

The man and the woman who employ themselves 
rationally, and never allow silly fancies to arise in their 
minds through the vacuum of idleness or the vapours 
of frivolity, may be sure of a tolerably pleasant journey 


262 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


together along the highway of life. As people marry 
sometimes because they have nothing else to do, so for 
the same reason do they quarrel. Long separations 
should be avoided: your Penelope may not go on 
weaving and unweaving her web for ever. It is not 
our business to take upon ourselves Mrs. Ellis’s prero¬ 
gative of lecturing married ladies ; but we venture to 
say that, if common sense be exercised, kindly feeling 
cherished, excuses made for slight faults, and habits of 
intemperance avoided, any pair may live amicably 
together. A couple of brutes radically vicious, or one 
such, no Karey in the shape of counsel or experience 
can break into double harness : so let them kick them - 
selves loose as soon as they please. Mr. Moore, in his 
Life of Lord Byron , tells us that genius rarely contains 
within it the compatibilities necessary for happiness in 
married life. We suspect that the incompatibilities are 
to be found in the bad moral disposition which is some¬ 
times unhappily associated with genius. If we had our 
way we would bring such lofty intellects to reflection 
and common decency by a cat-o’-ninetails. And yet 
their biographers must ever be parading their abomina¬ 
tions in the eyes of the world as things to be admired ! 

We were in conversation not long ago with a very 
sensible lady who had been married thirty years, when 
she propounded this rule as a most desirable one to be 
observed between husband and wife. ‘ Never,’ she said, 
1 let both be angry at the same time.’ ‘ Yes’, we replied, 
‘ it is an excellent law if it can be maintained. But we 
knew an old gentleman who had a standing bargain with 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


263 


his coachman, that when he drove him out to dine, they 
were on no occasion to be tipsy together. Now, as the 
master managed to drift into that condition nine times 
out of ten, John began to complain that he had not fair 
play, that it was not holding the reins with an even 
hand, that it was not chiselling on the square. Might 
it not be the same between husband and wife in their 
contentions? Might not one get nine-tenths of the 
innings ? ’ ‘Yes,’ she admitted, 1 such might be the case 
sometimes.’ 1 Then, would not this addition to your 
rule,’ we inquired, ‘ be an improvement ?—Never let both 
be angry at the same time, and let them claim the privi¬ 
lege turn and turn about. The very discussion between 
them of the question which had been angry on the last 
dispute would often bring them into a good temper again, 
and lead them, like children, to kiss and befriends.’ 

If however the ladies would condescend to take advice 
from ourselves we could teach them a better lesson still, 
—and it is this :—Never be angry at all—at least, 
never show your temper—keep it under strict control. 
If the lovely creatures only knew the power with which 
they are invested, and wielded it with discretion, they 
might undoubtedly rule the world. Anacreon enu¬ 
merates the several weapons of offence and defence with 
which the various orders of creation are endowed, and 
he concludes his catalogue by allotting to woman the 
gift of beauty as her spear and shield. She has smiles, 
she has tears, she has coaxings, she has poutings, she 
has winning devices and attractive ways; and if she 
uses these weapons aright she has only to advance and 


264 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


conquer. But when she indulges in anger and chiding, 
and seeks to storm the fortress by main force, she runs a 
risk of getting pitched headlong from the battlements. 
It is well perhaps that ladies are often ignorant of their 
power, or fritter it away by misuse, or the male portion 
of the human race would lie at their feet as docile and 
tractable as a lap-dog. We very much doubt—sad as 
it is to suppose such a contingency—whether even the 
Pope, the College of Cardinals, and the Romish priest¬ 
hood, would not have to succumb under an influence 
more prevailing and irresistible than their own. 

It is said that a large proportion of the cases that 
come before Sir Cresswell Cresswell are from the plebeian 
order, proving, as Mr. Roebuck declares, that ‘ middle- 
class morality is one of the greatest of shams.’* The 
term middle-class is very vague, and if widely extended 
might include two-thirds of a population. The Times 
is somewhat more definite. ‘ Five-sixths of the petitions 
for a dissolution of marriage,’ it says in a leading article, 
4 are unopposed, not because there is any collusion be¬ 
tween the parties, but because the case is perfectly clear, 
and no defence is possible. The petitioners belong for 
the most part to what may be called the lower part 
of the middle class, and the facts generally disclose 
either that a wife has left her husband and children to 
live with some one else, or to pass her life in open pro¬ 
fligacy ; or that a husband, after beating his wife for a 
year or two, has abandoned her and lives with a mistress 


* Parliamentary Debates. 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


265 


either in England or the United States.’ It is quite 
true that the divorce cases are ordinarily of a dull, 
humdrum, everyday character. Cab-drivers, journey¬ 
men carpenters, Cornish miners, mechanics, chimney¬ 
sweeps, blacksmiths—what have they to say in the 
presence of Sir Cresswell? ‘Story, sir; bless you, we 
have none to tell you,’—except perhaps that the lady 
took to drinking and the gentleman beat her; the lady 
ran into debt, and the gentleman advertised that he 
would not be answerable for ‘any debt or debts’ con¬ 
tracted by his wife; the lady ran away with a neigh¬ 
bouring shoemaker, and the gentleman was left alone. 
It is only when some couple of aristocratic pretensions—- 
some incipient lord or officer in a crack regiment, with 
his wife—enter the court and have money enough 
to pay for their own exposure, that we see the romance 
of self-contracted misery and unchecked natural per¬ 
verseness. 

If we classify the suitors to Sir Cresswell by their po¬ 
sitions in life, we think that the military profession has 
supplied the most salient instances of matrimonal dis¬ 
sension. Is it that in the piping times of peace our 
gallant officers must find some outlet for the super¬ 
abundance of their pugnacity ? When they have no 
foreign foe to encounter, must they perforce take to 
boxing the ears of their wives ? Our country gentlemen 
and ladies too, who frequent the cover-side and follow 
hounds, have sometimes leaped their light coursers over 
the rail of propriety, and found themselves in the morass 
of the Divorce Court. Fashionables of a London season, 


‘266 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MAJRBIAGE. 


who may have been seen cantering gracefully along 
Rotten Row in the morning, and making themselves at¬ 
tractive in gilded saloons at night, occasionally appeal 
to Sir Cresswell to slip off their matrimonial handcuffs, 
or stand before him in the unenviable character of co¬ 
respondents. Do not our legislators also, hereditary 
and elected, now and then claim the benefit of their own 
enactment? Do not our professional and literary men 
sometimes come before the public gaze linked to their 
respective ladies about as lovingly as two convicts at 
their labours ? On the other hand, we doubt very much 
whether any cool-headed, practical farmer has ever yet 
sought for a divorce. We have a notion that a good 
husbandman will for the most part prove a good husband. 
He has no enthusiasm in his composition; he takes 
matters in the world as he takes a wife, ‘for better, for 
worse.’ We were once in company with a Surrogate 
who was in the act of granting a marriage licence to a 
farmer. ‘ What’s the damage ?’ asked the man. ‘ Two 
pounds,’ said our friend. ‘ Two pounds! ’ exclaimed 
the agriculturist; ‘ it’s a vast sight of money to charge 
for getting wed.’ ‘Well,’ said the Surrogate, good- 
humouredly, ‘ if your intended wife is not worth forty 
shillings she’s worth nothing at all/ ‘ Ah ! ’ replied 
the other, shaking his head seriously, ‘ you may talk 
in that way; the lass is weel enough ; she’s fair and 
tidy at house and dairy work; but this wedding, you 
see, is a hit or a miss like—it’s but a bad bargain i’ 
times.’ The truth is, he had not run headlong into the 
engagement; he had counted the cost beforehand. Is 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


267 


it not Shakspeare who says, that there is no prescience 
in love ? The farmer however proves to us that the 
rule is not without an exception. He views matri¬ 
mony in reference to his pigs, his cows, and his 
dairy; he subjugates his conjugal to his bovine affec¬ 
tions; he subordinates home stock to farm stock; he re¬ 
gards with more complacency the increase in his cattle 
than the increase in his house; he loves, not intensely, 
but in such a measure as will last. 

We venture not to classify the cases of Divorce, ac¬ 
cording to religious denominations. Comparisons of this 
kind would be odious indeed; distinctions would be 
impolite and invidious. One averment however we 
may make—that no quaker has yet had to ask the aid 
of Sir Cresswell. Perhaps there is nothing wonderful in 
this: quakerism in its inner life is a mystery. Who ever 
saw a quaker marriage? Who ever saw a quakeress 
prospective of motherhood? Who ever saw a quaker 
baby? Who ever saw a quaker schoolboy playing at 
leap-frog? Are quakers full grown to begin with ? 
Have they realized that weird wish of Milton, and kept 
it a class secret among themselves, that some fresh method 
might be invented for perpetuating the generations of 
mankind ? They live in an atmosphere of their own. 
They buy and sell and get gain, it is true; but do they 
marry and give in marriage ? Are they composed of 
flesh, blood and bones, or are they mere mental abstrac¬ 
tion^ ? Some of them look square, real, and solid ; but 
we doubt whether, so far at any rate as they are con¬ 
cerned, the theory of Bishop Berkeley be not correct. 


268 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


Well, did you ever? As we are a mortal man that 
lives by bread, we have turned over our last leaf! After 
writing thus far currente calamo , we have reached the end 
of the tether imposed on us by the autocrat who presides 
over Fraser's Magazine. And yet we have scarcely 
crossed the threshold of our subject. We purposed to 
treat it subjectively, objectively, aesthetically, analyti¬ 
cally, synthetically, ethnologically, and in several philo¬ 
sophical modes besides ; we intended to turn it upside 
down and inside out, to examine it in every nook and 
crevice. Are we to retire from this extensive field of 
investigation when we are only on its borders ? Are 
the ladies of England, married and unmarried, to be 
deprived of the moral lessons that would be involved 
in our disquisition ? Perish the idea ! We have re¬ 
solved at once what we will do. We will write a 
Treatise on this interesting topic, and this Article shall 
form our introductory chapter—an octavo volume of 
500 pages, commencing with a steel engraving of the 
author, embellished by numerous well-executed illustra¬ 
tions, and dedicated to the women of England, wives 
and mothers, who are and who are to be. Do not be 
offended, Mr. Editor, if this seems to be a gentle puff 
of the opus magnum in prospect. What is to be done 
in these bustling times without puffing ? Every one, 
from the dealer in second-hand clothes to the millionaire 
merchant of our city, deals directly or indirectly in 
puffing. Every medical practitioner, from the vendor 
of Parr’s Life Pills to the Licentiate of the Eoyal Col- 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


269 


lege of Physicians, studies the art of puffing. Platform 
spouters, members of Parliament, free-traders, protec¬ 
tionists, teetotallers, political reformers, popular preach¬ 
ers !—ah ! how assiduously do ye puff your pet 
scheme, and how often are ye puffed in return, till 
verily ye become like inflated bladders and well-filled 
wind-bags! Shopkeepers puff their wares, railway 
directors their lines, artists their pictures, landlords 
their hotels, mothers their marriageable daughters, and 
if we are to believe S.G.O., even secretaries can puff the 
religious societies with which they are connected. 
Great Britain seems to have become one vast, ventose 
Puffin Island. Then, O ye publishers and authors, are 
ye not experts in this delicate art, and believers, as Mr. 
Biglow says, ‘ in humbug general^ ? ’ Moreover, the 
system is creeping over our periodical literature. Lis¬ 
ten to the Magazine Article puff—‘We have good 
reason for saying that the treatise on the manufacture 
of mouse-traps in the “ Monthly Luminary ” which has 
excited so much sensation, is from the pen of the cele¬ 
brated literary character, Mr. So-and-so ! ’ Bless Mr. 
So-and-so and his mouse-traps ! May his fame shine 
forth as the sun ! He richly deserves the puff and the 
proprietor’s cheque, be it for little or much. Deroga¬ 
tory all this, do you say, to the character of our learned 
age? Nonsense!—it is in the spirit of the times; it is 
as necessary to our literary existence as is the air 
we breathe to our physical being. You will not there¬ 
fore, we are assured, Mr. Editor, strike out this puff 


270 


THE PHILOSOPHY OF MARRIAGE. 


preliminary—this gentle zephyr—which will enable our 
trim vessel, when it is launched, to catch the auram 
popularem with its gently swelling sails, and will waft 
it like a thing of life over the broad, smiling sea of profit 
and applause. 


VII. 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND FACTORY 
OPERATIVES. 

- 1 - 


The district of which Manchester is the metropolis has 
but few attractions to the casual observer : the surface 
of the country is marked by no natural beauties; the 
manners of the people are characterized by but few ar¬ 
tificial graces. And yet, as a mart of commerce, a hive 
of industry, a magazine of art, a nurse of invention, a 
workshop of constructive skill, a spring of wealth, it 
stands out, in its shroud of smoke, an object of more 
practical importance and scientific interest than the 
most fertile and sunny portions of our land. It owes its 
distinctive characteristics for the most part to human 
agency. If it be true, as in a modified sense it is, that 
‘ God made the country, man the town,’ the aphorism is 
especially fulfilled in its application to our manufacturing 
districts. Neither are they of ancient origin, as such. 
They are not like the green fields, which have supplied 
food for the cattle from the earliest times: in their dis¬ 
tinctive features they are not a century old. A hundred 



272 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


years ago there were no tall factory-chimneys, no pala¬ 
tial warehouses, no colossal foundries, no gigantic work¬ 
shops. But suddenly the coal-beds which had slept 
their deep sleep unheeded so long, were opened out, 
and the waste moor which covered them became thickly 
populated ; the streams that had dashed down the hill¬ 
sides, and pursued their more sluggish course to the 
ocean, for a thousand years almost unnoticed, were now 
turned into yoke-fellows of art, as agents of motive 
power in the production of manufactures, and those hill¬ 
sides became instinct with human life ; discovery and 
invention—discovery of power and invention in applying 
it—were born almost together, and grew and increased 
hand in hand, bidding the wilderness flourish and the 
lonely places teem with vast multitudes; the rumble of 
machinery was now heard on many a heath which 
aforetime had echoed no other sounds than those from 
the splash of the cascade, or the bleating of the sheep, 
or the chirping of the moor-fowl; fishing villages be¬ 
came seaports, and large towns sprang as it were out of 
the earth under the wand of the great magician, Steam; 
within the last thirty years lines of railway have been 
carried in every direction over these rough and rugged 
districts, exalting the valley and laying low the hill and 
perforating the mountain, bidding towns and peoples 
spring up by their side ; old things have almost passed 
into the forgotten, and a century has witnessed the 
growth to matured vigour of one of our most populous 
and important counties. 

And indeed this district, not only in its physical but 


FACTOBY OPERATIVES. 


273 


its economic characteristics, bears on it the mark of a 
late origin and a sudden rise. It wants the consolidation 
of centuries. It is variable in its condition, oscillating 
between extremes. It is like one of its own engines, 
often working with smoothness and precision, but some¬ 
times breaking loose and spreading consternation and 
ruin. Like its own machinery too, it is occasionally 
thrown out of working order by seemingly trifling 
causes. The mechanism that will turn the wheels of a 
factory, or measure to the millionth part of an inch, may 
be deranged by the point of a needle ; and that stupen¬ 
dous organism of trade on which so many human beings 
depend for subsistence, may be thrown into confusion 
by causes so small in their origin as to have been en¬ 
tirely unforeseen. The principles of trade are neither 
uncertain nor imperfectly understood; and yet the in¬ 
terests of the manufacturer may be disturbed by forces 
almost as light • and imperceptible as the breeze which 
agitates the smoke from his tall chimney, while in his 
individual prosperity or adversity is involved the welfare 
or want of many hundreds of his poorer fellow-creature3. 

These oscillations however, so far at least as they 
depend on irregularities of opinion on the part either of 
the employer or the employed, seem to be gradually 
moving over a smaller arc. In the early period of our 
manufactures an inventor was in personal danger from 
the mob, andhis new machine rarely escaped destruction. 
Hargreaves, Kay, and Arkwright had to fly for their 
lives. From the commencement of the present cen¬ 
tury commotions in our manufacturing districts have 

VOL. II. t 


274 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


constantly recurred. Sometimes these have originated in 
disputes between masters and workpeople on the ques¬ 
tion of wages, ending in strikes and lock-outs; some¬ 
times in want of employment and consequent destitution, 
as springing from depression in trade; sometimes in a 
union of commercial stagnation and political discontent. 
At a season of distress, agitators, with certain properties 
to qualify them for popular leaders, have frequently 
risen up, to impress upon the workpeople that their 
trials were caused or increased by some defect in our 
legislation; and uneducated men in a state of privation 
are naturally ready to listen to any charlatan who de¬ 
clares that they are suffering under a grievance, and can 
suggest a remedy for it; as a patient in a lingering sick¬ 
ness is eager to try any specific which is suggested to 
him, even though it be one of the panaceas of a quack 
advertisement. Then riots and disturbances have often 
followed: there have been times, not-a few, when a 
large portion of Lancashire has been under a reign of 
terror from these threatening demonstrations and fierce 
outbreaks. But of late years much more moderation 
and discretion have been displayed both by masters 
and operatives in their mutual relations. Even in the 
long lock-out at Preston in 1854, there was nothing 
approximating to a riot. Experience probably has 
taught a useful lesson and suggested juster sentiments 
to both sides in the antagonism of capital and labour. 

The present condition of our manufacturing popula¬ 
tion, in its cause, is entirely exceptional, and in its effect 
it is singularly illustrative of the improved tone of all 


FAC TOBY OPEBATIVES. 


27 5 


classes among us. It would be superfluous to allude at 
any length to the patience which the operatives have 
hitherto manifested under their privations. Eloquent 
testimony has been borne to it by the most distinguished 
orators and statesmen in our land, and it has been 
watched with silent sympathy by those whose duty has 
called them into immediate intercourse with suffering 
families. And while distress, on the one hand, has 
summoned forth the latent virtue of submissive endur¬ 
ance, it has called into being on the other an intensity 
of sympathy which no former period has witnessed. 
As yet the several classes among us—the upper, the 
middle, and the lower—have entertained but one feel¬ 
ing of mutual kindness and goodwill, from a general 
consciousness that there is a community of suffering 
springing out of an unavoidable cause. 

From the period when this fratricidal war commenced 
in America, we trace the gradual and progressive march 
of destitution throughout the whole of those districts 
which depend on the cotton-trade. The manufacturer 
of limited means, whose stock of cotton was but scanty, 
soon began to feel the pressure, and to prepare for 
working short-time. By degrees the larger capitalist 
experienced the same tightness of trade from the scar¬ 
city and dearness of the raw material, and reduced his 
hours of employment; till at length few mills remained 
in full work, except those in which the fine threads were 
manufactured or spun, and but little cotton compara¬ 
tively was required. Erelong the doors of many of the 
factories were closed, and the tall chimneys stood smoke- 


276 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


less from morn till night. Then idlers were seen loung¬ 
ing about the streets ; beggars, many of them impostors, 
became more importunate along the thoroughfares ; the 
workhouse gates were more thronged; the doors of 
the relieving-office were besieged. The Poor Law 
Commissioners’ returns are plain prosaic facts, and we 
gather from them that the increase of pauperism between 
June 30, 1861, and June 30, 1862, in some of those 
unions which are most dependent on the cotton manu¬ 
facture, amounted to three and four hundred per cent. 

The painful characteristics of the present distress are 
its wide area and its long continuance. During an 
ordinary lock-out or turn-out an individual town may 
suffer very severely, but the mischief does not extend 
further. During a period of general commercial pres¬ 
sure there is often a considerable amount of distress 
equally spread over the manufacturing districts, but it 
passes away gradually, when the temporary obstacles 
are removed that impeded the stream of commerce. 
Now, however, we are met by commercial stagnation 
in its widest and most enduring form. The fountain 
has been closed that poured forth its streams, and by its 
irrigating floods infused fertility into the parched de¬ 
sert. Our usual supply of cotton is cut off, our mills 
are deserted, our machinery is standing, our money is 
stagnating. We may have hoards of gold in our banks 
or strong-chests, but it is comparatively useless unless 
it is circulating. Have you ever reflected upon that 
marvellous dispensation of Providence, whereby a liveli¬ 
hood accrues for the millions of a nation out of the 


FACTORY OPERATIVES. 


277 


mutual action of trade, and the consequent interchange 
and diffusion of capital ? If the blood stagnates in the 
body, life becomes extinct, but there is energy and vigour 
as it courses through the veins; and so is it with capital in 
relation to our body-politic. When it flows on in one 
unceasing round, rushing out through the arteries and 
streaming back through the veins, permeating and wind¬ 
ing through the smallest ducts to the very extremities 
of the system, there is life with a supply of all its 
necessaries. Mark, how slowly the lifeblood of our 
manufacturing districts is now flowing, in what feeble 
streams it is trickling on, how many of its usual chan¬ 
nels are dry ! 

It is computed that, in round numbers, 450,000 per¬ 
sons are employed in the cotton manufacture throughout 
the United Kingdom, of whom 315,000 reside in Lan¬ 
cashire. The total population of the Lancashire cotton 
districts may be set down as 2,000,000. Now, assum¬ 
ing that the average weekly earning of each of the 
450,000 is 10s. 6d., the amount distributed in wages 
every seven days would be £250,000. At this time 
80,000 are unemployed, whose united earnings would 
be £42,000, and 370,000 half-employed, whose wages 
would be upwards of £97,000 ; so that now the weekly 
circulation of £139,000 is entirely cut off, and that mainly 
in one county. But this only represents a portion of 
the pressure. Some 200,000 persons are engaged in 
certain departments of business which are dependent on 
the cotton-trade, and so suffer and rejoice with it in its 
depression and its prosperity. Indeed, in a purely 


278 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


manufacturing town it would be difficult to imagine 
any one of the inhabitants who was not in some degree 
affected by its trade. The manufacturer suffers of 
course in a time of commercial stagnation; the shop¬ 
keeper is often mainly dependent on the factory opera¬ 
tives for his trade—and as a consequence, when they 
are out of work, his profits and his rates are in an in¬ 
verse ratio ; and the owner of cottage property has 
frequently to forego one-half his rental. 

Of the comparative pressure from this commercial 
stagnation upon our several manyfacturing towns, we 
have yet had no tabular statement compiled. From 
careful enquiries, however, we have reason to believe 
that at this time,* in Blackburn, Ashton-under-Lyne, 
Stockport, and Preston, more than one-half of the cotton 
operatives are entirely out of work, and one in six, 
seven, or eight, out of their respective populations, is 
receiving parochial relief. From the varying phases of 
employments dependent upon cotton, it is very difficult 
at present to arrive at any statistical accuracy ; but the 
distress has been creeping onward gradually, till all our 
manufacturing towns have now begun to feel it severely. 
They are not suffering indeed, neither will they suffer, 
in the same degree, from the nature of the occupations 
and trades that distinguish them. Such places as 
Blackburn, Preston, Stockport, Ashton-under-Lyne, 
Stalybridge, Hyde, are almost entirely dependent on 
the cotton-mills; so that when these close a sad spec¬ 
tacle appears before us. Kochdale, on the other hand, 
[* This article appeared in September, 1862.—1866.] 


FACTORY OPERATIVES. 


279 


is carrying on an active business in the woollen manu¬ 
facture, in which some 2,650 are now fully employed; 
it contains also extensive foundries, as well as some 
small silk-mills and dye-works. Oldham has several 
foundries and machine-shops, one of unprecedented 
magnitude. Bolton too has its large foundries, 
machine-shops, and bleach-works; in these there are 
now 5,000 persons working full-time. In Wigan many 
of the residents support themselves and their families 
from the surrounding collieries. Manchester has an 
aggregate of 13,540 workpeople now fully employed in 
silk and small-ware mills, in print-works, dye-works, 
machine-shops, and foundries; while 4,443, who are 
usually engaged in such kinds of labour, are on short- 
time, and 5,628 wholly out of work. Besides, the 
characteristic trade of Manchester is not that of the 
manufacturer, but the merchant: large numbers have 
their occupation in our warehouses. 

During the last weary twelve months, while the 
manufacturing districts have been gradually sinking 
into a state of deeper gloom, we are thankful to believe 
that the poor have not been neglected. Much distress 
doubtless there has been and is, but we are convinced 
that vigilance and sympathy have not been wanting for 
its relief. The Poor Law has been modified for the 
next six months; and though we regret that the 
measure was postponed to the end of the session, and 
passed hurriedly, we think it will enable our Boards of 
Guardians to meet any emergency that may arise. The 
Government took a prudent step in sending their Com- 


280 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


missioner throughout the distressed localities to advise 
and report. Our Guardians of the poor, we think, have, 
as a rule, been faithful to their trust. Their duty is an 
invidious one ; they have to watch over the interests of 
the ratepayer as well as the applicant for relief; they 
have to guard themselves against imposition on every 
side ; they have to be vigilant and firm, lest the money 
entrusted to them be squandered on the dissolute and 
idle; for a season of distress is a signal ever for the 
impostor to come forward with his importunities, 
whether as an applicant to the Board or as a beggar in 
the public streets. Then how very largely has paro¬ 
chial aid been supplemented by the funds that have 
been placed at the disposal of our relief-committees! 
Soup-kitchens have been established, and food of most 
kinds has been distributed gratuitously and largely. 
Sewing-schools also, and institutions for the employment 
and instruction of our young women, are becoming 
most useful adjuncts in the combined efforts to sustain 
the wrestling spirits of our deserving poor. 

The only subject worthy of notice on which a feeling 
of disaffection has yet been manifested among our 
operatives is the labour-test, and even this is not such 
as to create any great uneasiness. Towards the Go¬ 
vernment of the country they do not seem to entertain 
any hostile sentiment; they do not attribute blame to 
the Ministry for the distress they are enduring. They 
have had their meetings to discuss the question of in¬ 
tervention between the American belligerents, but the 
predominance of opinion among them appears to be, 


FACTORY OPERATIVES. 


281 


that premature interference would have rather an in¬ 
jurious than a beneficial effect upon the general interests 
of trade. The labour-test, however, is a matter that 
comes home to them daily ; and as there are always 
some among them who are gifted with considerable 
fluency of speech, it forms a suitable topic for their 
harangues. It is a question on which the Guardians 
alone must decide. To abrogate it altogether, as some 
Boards have done, is undoubtedly to debase a spirit of 
benevolence into a lax tone of management, and is cal¬ 
culated to produce an injurious effect, however kindly 
may be the motive that suggests the course. It is 
opening a floodgate to great abuse ; for the chronic re¬ 
cipients of relief are mostly those who have an utter 
objection to all work. At the same time it would be 
injudicious and unfeeling now to insist upon the test 
in its stringency. The honest, independent workman 
would rather do something for his money than receive 
it in idleness. But let the law under which he has to 
labour be carried out in a generous and humane spirit, 
and with a becoming regard for the exceptional circum¬ 
stances of men who are anxious to obtain employment, 
but cannot from the necessity of the time. 

On turning our faces towards the future, we look into 
darkness and gloom; the utmost we can see are indis¬ 
tinct shadowy forms, that leave a melancholy impression 
on our minds. We sincerely wish that Mr. Villiers’ 
expectations may be realised, and that in October we 
may experience a revival of trade by a more abundant 
supply of cotton ; but by what process of reasoning and 


282 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


on what data he has arrived at that conclusion, we are 
quite at a loss to discover. We fear that we have not 
yet reached the gloomiest stage of the distress; but, 
come what may, we do not relax our confidence in the 
energy of the Lancashire will and in the largeness of 
the national heart. 

Our friends at a distance, as we may gather both from 
newspapers and private communications, are beginning 
to regard us- as in the very extremity of destitution. 
The Press is opening its columns freely to those who 
seem inclined to take the gloomiest view of our con¬ 
dition, and to describe it in language too harrowing and 
sensational; and thus the world at large is brought to 
look upon our manufacturing towns as filled with men 
and women, pale and haggard, and almost dying in the 
open streets. There is great privation, we allow, 
more particularly in some few of our manufacturing 
districts, and we fear the worst is not yet; still, no 
revolting scenes meet the eye, and in Manchester, for 
instance, a casual visitor would not remark any signs 
of especial distress in our streets. We are far from 
wishing to make light of our position—it is sufficiently 
grave; but we would caution our readers against being 
led away too hurriedly by pictures which are frequently 
larger than life, and by that superfluity of sentiment 
with which we seem likely to be inundated. 

As the afternoon is pleasant and sunny, let the idle 
reader join us in a short tour of inspection through 
some of the back-streets, where factory operatives are 
for the most part resident. See here; we have one to 


FACTORY OPERATIVES. 


28 3 


our mind—long, straight, and somewhat narrow, opening 
out at the end into a broad thoroughfare. The houses 
contain one sitting-room and two bedchambers, and 
average about three shillings in weekly rent. Here and 
there you observe the pathway is turned into a drying- 
ground, where linen fresh from the wash is suspended 
on rails,—linen, the make-up of which we need not too 
closely scrutinize ; only take care you do not get a flap 
on the eye from it as you pass. Of living objects, the 
first that attracts our attention is an ancient figure, in 
somewhat dilapidated attire, with a long beard, not cut 
in military fashion, and a hat out of all shape jauntily 
stuck on the side of his head. He is leading along a 
venerable donkey and a creaky cart, filled with sand¬ 
stones and rectangular blocks of salt—solid parallelo¬ 
grams twenty inches long—each of which we might 
imagine would be a half-year’s consumption for a 
moderate family. As we pace along the causeway, we 
get an inside view of many of the houses, the doors of 
which are for the most part open. Some of the interiors 
seem to be neat and clean; while others exhibit a 
random scene, where everything is where it ought not 
to be—a confused grouping of chairs, tables, crockery, 
pots, pans, stools, many of the articles topsy-turvy, and 
all more or less covered with dust and dirt,—the whole 
still-life view suggesting in its graceful negligence an 
idea of the picturesque rather than the comfortable. 
Still, we do not see many idle operatives inside, male 
or female : the men, if unemployed at the mill, are 
picking up 1 odd jobs; ’ the young women are most 


284 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


likely at the sewing-school. Moving on, we come to a 
stout lady of forty sitting on a stool at her door and 
sunning herself, her baby stretched on her extended 
knees, with its head bent back and its mouth open—a 
pleasant posture, it may be, for the flexible, gutta-percha 
limbs of childhood, but by no means an agreeable one, 
we should fancy, for humanity in mature life. The 
mother is smoking her pipe leisurely and lazily, and 
seems to be in a state of comatose enjoyment, which, if 
not so sublimated, may be quite as real as that which, 
according to philosophers and poets, springs from the 
mental or emotional. ‘ How’s the baby ? ’ we venture 
to ask. 1 Well,’ she replies lazily, the smoke curling 
slowly from her lips, 1 middling, nobbut middling. 
Bless its little heart! it nayther dees nor does ; ’ meaning 
that it does not thrive—it neither comes on nor goes back. 
As we advance, we come upon a group of young girls, some 
half-dozen of the rising generation. They are engaged 
in the game of 1 hop-scotch,’ the diagrams having been 
carefully drawn with chalk on the causeway; they are 
very earnest in their pursuit of pleasure, and seem to be 
singularly indifferent about cotton-famines, or anything 
else but their match. But hear ! a voice from a dis¬ 
tance. 1 Lucretia ! ’ shouts from her door the mother of 
one of them, who is away without leave.—No reply. 
‘ Lucretia! ’ an octave higher.—No reply. 1 Lucretia! ’ in 

a scream, ‘ come here, or I’ll-,’ ending with a threat, 

which in its plain, Saxon terseness is in striking antithesis 
to the classical name of the chaste Roman matron. Inside 
this house we see a girl of seven scouring the floor, as 


FACTORY OPERATIVES. 


285 


oldfashioned as if she had scoured floors for forty years. 
Children here, you must remember, are not brought up 
with a nurse apiece. Now we meet a wandering trades¬ 
man, enveloped from his neck downwards in a swelling 
pyramid of bladders, glittering in their variety of colours. 
He might be some heathen deity clothed in his rainbow 
or sparkling cloud. He is much disturbed by the little 
children, who will follow him and play with his bladders, 
while, like a fashionable lady in her crinoline, he can¬ 
not come up to them within striking distance. He does 
not seem to be much patronized. 

Moving forwards we approach a knot of matrons, 
various in size and form,* who are holding a gossip 

* A few months ago we witnessed a spirited feat "by one of 
this order of gossips. Four women were standing, as we may 
suppose the above were, discussing the current topics of the hour, 
when some half-dozen lads came along, and passed them at a 
running pace. One of them, a lanky, hulking fellow of fifteen, 
who seemed, as he swung himself forward, to be all head and clogs, 
kicked intentionally a can of water that belonged to one of the 
women, and sent it rolling to a distance. Not a moment was 
lost. The owner of the vessel sprang after him like a greyhound 
from the slip. She wore a short dress suitable for running, and 
black stockings, which you could follow nearly to the calf, and 
her legs were very thin. ‘ Well done, Dolly ! ’ ‘At him, Dolly!’ 
* Go it, Dolly! ’ the rest shouted in encouragement. The lad 
dodged here and there like a hare hard-pressed, and Dolly was 
ever close upon him. At length, on emerging from a passage 
she made her spring, caught him by the back of the neck, gave 
him two hearty cuffs, one on each side of the head, and returned 
to her gossips, rather ‘ puffled,’ as she would have termed it, but 
recompensed for her efforts by a sense that justice had been 
satisfied, as well as by the shouts of acclamation that greeted her. 


286 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


with a vendor of useful articles,—toasting-forks, grid¬ 
irons, and suchlike commodities. He is a Cheap John, 
and a wit accordingly. ‘ Come, dames ! ’ he says coax- 
ingly, ‘ buy a toasting-fork and a gridiron—only nine- 
pence together, as we are old cronies, you know.’ 
‘ What’s the use of toasting-forks and gridirons,’ asks 
a stout lady, ‘if you don’t bring us a four-pound 
loaf and a beefsteak?’ ‘Why,’ replies John, ‘I see 
that a Papish Archbishop in Ireland says you’re starving 
on beefsteaks! ’* ‘Does he, eh ? ’ inquires a thin-faced 
dame, handling one of the toasting-forks; ‘ I’d like to 
let out some of his papish blood wi’ this, lad,—I would.’ 
‘ Or what do say,’ John chimes in, holding up a grid¬ 
iron, ‘ to making a fourpenny frizzle on him ? ’ ‘ He’s 

fat enough for that, Pse warrant,’ responds another of 
the gossips. John unhappily cannot effect a sale; and 
he moves on, half-threatening to sell off his effects at 
prime cost, realise his floating capital, and retire from 
public life into the workhouse. Children again ! drat 
them. ‘ Children—children everywhere ! ’ Here they 
are, swinging round a skipping-rope right across our 
path, while two or three bare-legged girls are leaping 
up and keeping time as it passes under their feet. 
Children ! go where you will, you find them springing 
up like indestructible weeds. Married folks seem to 
blunder into families without premeditation, and then 
they allow their offspring to float away as carelessly as 

. [* Such a remark had been made,—it may have been by 

Archbishop Hughes, who was then in Ireland from America._- 

1866 .] 


FACTORY OPERATIVES. 


287 


do zoophytes of the sponge-order. But now we come 
across a doleful-looking man, treading with a funereal 
step, carrying a basket on his arm, and moaning out a 
cry of ‘ Salad, ho ! ’ Tea-time is approaching, and 
cresses, radishes, and lettuces are used, in technical 
phrase, as ‘ relishes.’ His halfpenny bunches seem to 
go off. Now the vista of the street is opening out, and 
we catch a glimpse of the broad thoroughfare at the 
end. There you remark a youth whistling some negro 
melody, and dancing to it heel and toe with his wooden- 
soled clogs, and moving his elbows also in time, in 
defiance of short-work; while near him is standing in me¬ 
ditative mood, with his tray before him suspended from 
his neck, a man called ‘ Toffy Jem,’ quite regardless of his 
prancing and musical neighbour. Jem deals in parkin, 
a greasy compound of treacle and meal, and in a species 
of confectionary known as ‘ slap-up,’ in Indian rock, and 
in prime Everton toffy—all of which he cracks with his 
little hammer as scientifically as a geologist, and with 
much greater assurance about the genuineness of the 
material he is handling. Jem is patronized by the little 
children far and near ; they look up in his face wonder- 
ingly, as if he held in his embrace all the spices of 
Arabia, and they know that he gives them honest 
pen’orths. He is, moreover, regarded in his silent 
manner as a philosopher by the aged. We never pene¬ 
trated the depths of his wisdom. It may be with him 
as. with many others who have acquired a reputation 
for profound thought from their taciturnity, or for fine 
writing because nobody could understand it. What 


288 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


Galgacus said of the fastnesses of Britain may be true 
of the mental fastnesses of many who are in a higher 
station than Toffy Jem —Omne ignotum pro magnifico 
est* 

Here we are in the broad thoroughfare; but as a 
penalty for dallying too long over the picturesque 
scene, we are now caught in a strfeam of human beings 
—men and women, boys and girls—and are in danger of 
being swept away by the flood. The mills are loosing; 
and at this point there happens to be the conflux of many 
tributaries. The current is not now flowing in its full¬ 
ness, for some of the adjacent factories are closed ; but 
if you are not careful, it is strong enough to sweep you 
away. What a clatter of iron-ringed clogs on the flags ! 
What a hum of many voices ! As we are closely hemmed 
in by the lads and lasses, ‘ the light wings of Zephyr ’ 
come to us ‘ oppressed ’ with an oily 1 perfume,’ which 
may not be quite so agreeable as that in a fashionable 
drawing-room, but which is more healthy. You observe 
a great variety in the appearance of the young women. 
Some are neatly attired, and evidently pay due attention 
to the personal graces on workdays. Their bonnets, 
shawls, dresses, boots are adjusted with care, even in 
the hurry of leaving the factory. Others are but care¬ 
less and slovenly in dress and manner ; they have thick 
shawls wrapped round their heads in place of bonnets, 
and they are quite content to appear in clogs, gingham 
bedgowns, linsey-woolsey petticoats, and coarse aprons. 


* Tacitus, Agric. ch. 30. 


FACTORY OPERATIVES. 


289 


If one of this class happen to wear a bonnet, it is sure 
to be stuck full of artificial flowers, sadly changed from 
their pristine bloom. Some of the young women, you 
see, are walking along with an imperturbable gravity, 
quite heedless of the noise around them; they are 
Sunday-school teachers, Sun day-scholars, and operatives 
of the better class. Others—those chiefly of the shawled 
and bedgowned order—are talking somewhat loudly, 
perhaps about their sweethearts, perhaps about an in¬ 
tended trip in Whit-week, and are perfectly indifferent 
whether we hear them or not. Those lively daughters 
of Eve are too natural to have many secrets. Mingled 
in the crowd too are factory operatives of the male 
order, and mechanics with broad shoulders and grimy 
faces. There are boys also in considerable numbers—* 
tenters from the mill, and sooty-visaged young Vulcans 
from the machine-shop. Some of the lads are making 
their way home quietly to their tea; others are showing 
their dexterity by a friendly interchange of scientific 
passes, whereby caps fly into the air, and are trampled 
on or kicked by the crowd as they fall. From the 
lively demeanour of most in the crowd, you would not 
say that their strength had been exhausted by their day’s 
work; nor indeed can factory employment per se be 
now considered very heavy, even for females. They do 
not, as a rule, speak of it as such. They soon wear out 
and become old, it is true; but it is not the actual 
labour that causes this early decay so much as the 
impure atmosphere in which they have to work, the 
changes through which they have to pass from a very 
VOL. II. u 


290 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


warm temperature to the cold air, their meagre dietary, 
their want of fresh air and outdoor exercise, their ill- 
ventilated dwellings, and their neglect of sanitary 
rules. As we inspect the female faces in this crowd, we 
dare not call them handsome. Here and there the eye 
may rest upon an interesting countenance, but this is 
rather the exception; their features generally are not 
of an attractive mould; their complexion is unhealthy, 
and their teeth are going or gone. Not but that we 
should see them under a more agreeable aspect in their 
Sunday dresses. In their Sunday-school the most 
respectable of these young women have rather a pleasing 
look—many of the girls have a fresh and healthy 
appearance. Still, in those towns where manufactures had 
an early origin, and the mill-operatives are, as such, in 
the third or fourth generation, beauty must be regarded 
rather as exceptional among the females. 

The workpeople in our manufacturing districts have 
not generally stood well in the estimation of distant 
observers; their faults have often come out conspicu¬ 
ously before the public, while their better qualities are 
unknown. That they are without failings we are far 
from saying,—and among what class are we to look for 
perfection ? Nevertheless, they have their good pro¬ 
perties as well as their defective ones; and the bene¬ 
volent may be assured, that in aiding them now their 
contributions will not be ill-spent, nor unrequited by 
grateful hearts. 

Although we have aforetime described in 1 Fraser’s 
Magazine ’ the habits and characteristics of our work- 


FACTORY OPERATIVES . 


291 


ing-people, it may not be ill-timed to touch again 
briefly on some of their distinctive traits, now that they 
are beginning to be regarded with so much interest by 
every class in our land, and almost by every nation 
near and far distant. 

In a large manufacturing town the lowest stratum of 
society is a vein by no means agreeable to explore. 
We are under the necessity of introducing you here 
to a class who are emigrants, or descendants of emi¬ 
grants, from the sister isle. Many of them cannot be 
ranked at all, except by a very wide system of classifi¬ 
cation, under the category of the working classes; 
many of them, being gentlemen born, are too proud or 
too lazy to do anything for their living, though not too 
independent to receive parochial relief; others are 
engaged, as mill-hands, but their free spirits mostly 
chafe under the necessity of such stringent and periodic 
labour. In some parts of our manufacturing towns the 
Irish congregate in swarms, several families occupying 
the same house or even the same apartment; and they 
give full play in England to the frolicsome disposition 
they have brought from their native isle or inherited 
from their fathers, indulging in shillelagh practice, and 
rejoicing in the luxury of broken heads at funeral- 
wakes and weddings, on Sundays and St. Patrick’s-day. 
There is a very broad line drawn between them and the 
English operatives both in daily labour and social life. 
The streets where the Irish locate get a bad name, 
and the English family avoids them. There is but 
little association between the races. The Saxon and 


292 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


the Celt differ in manners, habits, and most of all in 
religion. Among the young women of the two coun¬ 
tries, fierce theological discussions are carried on during 
the hours of work ; among the men, political contro¬ 
versies sometimes wax warm. The Irish too are 
supposed to reduce the price of labour, and are conse¬ 
quently regarded with jealousy. There are doubtless 
some decent, well-behaved families among them, but in 
general they are a low, brutalized class, ready to quar¬ 
rel and fight for anything or nothing, for hate or love, 
with themselves or with others—mere waifs, moved by 
the breath of the priest, or driven by their own wild 
passions, or both.* 

Among our English operative population also there 
is undeniably a very low order. The parents are de¬ 
graded, and the children grow up in like manner ; the 
young women from childhood know but little of the 
decencies of life, and the young men are equally igno¬ 
rant, uncultivated, and debased. They attend neither 
school nor place of worship on the Sunday, and pro¬ 
bably spend that day in their ordinary working-dress. 
They frequent casinos, Sunday-evening music-saloons 
and places of a similar kind. Their language in the 
street is loud, indecent, and unrestrained by a sense ot 

* In any large town like Manchester there is a lower stratum 
of society than this,—a heterogeneous rabble from all nations—> 
wandering musicians, organ-grinders, showmen, tumblers, prize¬ 
fighters, dog-fanciers, workers in plaster of Paris, coiners, pick¬ 
pockets, and suchlike—but they can hardly be ranked among 
the operative classes. 


FACTORY OPERATIVES. 


293 


shame. They grow up, and in time perhaps become 
themselves parents of families, from which but little 
hope of good can be entertained. 

A large body of our working-people, again, evince, 
as parents, some anxiety about their families, but do 
not sufficiently give effect to their wishes by personal 
example and energetic control. They are glad to see 
their children attend their Sunday-school and place of 
worship, as they themselves perhaps once did ; but 
they are content with looking on approvingly or with¬ 
out disapprobation.* Out of this class many of the 
young people grow up creditably, and some of them 
make their way to a good position in the world. They 
use the advantages placed within their reach, and im¬ 
prove themselves gradually in mental and moral cul¬ 
ture. In such cases it is not so much to parental con¬ 
trol and direction that they owe their advancement, as 
to personal energy and a well-considered, steadily- 
pursued system of self-help. 

We regret to say that the largest section is not that 
where parents and children are equally attentive to their 
several responsibilities, and follow one course of moral 
and religious duty. Still, such families are to be found 


* We heard of a lady who, not long ago, was inculcating on 
her Sunday-school class the principles contained in the fifth com¬ 
mandment, when, addressing a girl of ten, she said,—‘ Now, 
Phoe*he, you know what your mother does to you: what is it, 
Phoebe, that your mother does to you ? I’m sure you know.’ 
‘ Ye-es,’ replied Phoebe with a whine, which going on in a crescendo 
scale ended in a sob—‘ye-es, ma’am, she mills me every day near.’ 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


294 

among our working-people. The young women, if they 
work in crowds, are careful to maintain a respectable 
demeanour, not mixing with the coarse and unman¬ 
nerly : at home they spend their time in useful occupa¬ 
tions ; they are regular at their school and church, and 
take a pleasure in doing good according to their means 
and opportunities. In prosperous times they are able 
to earn enough for their immediate wants, and to lay 
up a little against future contingencies. Such a family 
might be envied by many an one which is moving in a 
much higher sphere : the parents are proud of the re¬ 
spectability of their children, and the children exert 
themselves to afford comfort and enjoyment to their 
parents. It is a very beautiful exhibition of the reflex 
action of moral training, when the young and healthy 
feel it to be a religious duty to aid and support, along 
the downhill and closing stage of life, their fathers and 
mothers, who have brought them up under a sense of 
filial duty and self-respect. 

Among the personal characteristics of the working 
classes, much has been said and written of their manli¬ 
ness. We apprehend that in this quality they are only 
like others in the same rank of life : whatever difference 
there may be, springs out of the peculiar circumstances 
in which each is placed. The labourer in the country 
has been brought up in the custom of touching his hat 
to the squire or clergyman on the road, and receiving a 
‘ good-day ’ in return : in this there is neither servility 
on the one side, nor assumption on the other; it is be¬ 
coming in itself, and mutually agreeable. But the 


FACTORY OPERATIVES. 


295 


operative in the manufacturing districts rarely touches 
his hat to anyone ; he meets his employer, knowing him 
to be such, without any sign of recognition whatever. 
They who look charitably on such behaviour may call 
it manly ; they who take an opposite view of it may 
consider it rude. We do not think, however, that in¬ 
trinsically there is anything involved in it which is per 
se either manly or rude. Nothing offensive is intended 
by it, nothing unmannerly is understood by it. The 
rustic is generally in the neighbourhood of some families 
who are above him—those of the landed gentry and 
the clergy, whom from childhood he has been taught to 
look upon with respect: the manufacturing operative 
has always lived apart from any class above him ; he 
has grown up in the midst of his own order, and seen 
socially nothing beyond it. We do not mean that the 
uneasy, worrying jealousy between capital and labour 
may not render in some degree more definite the line of 
demarcation between rich and poor in our manufacturing 
towns: still, what seems independence among our opera¬ 
tives is simply manner springing out of their bring¬ 
ing-up. 

Among the better order of manufacturing operatives, 
strange as it may seem to some, there is a native gentility, 
which it is pleasing to witness; and among the class 
generally there is a sincere disposition to oblige. Under 
an uncouth demeanour there is frequently a kind spirit. 
We have always observed a readiness with them to direct 
you wherever you wished to go ; we have never found 
an instance of a desire to mislead you on your way,— r 


296 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


that species of refined cruelty which hardened vagabonds 
in some places have a peculiar pleasure in inflicting. 
For example, one Sunday evening, in the depth of win¬ 
ter, we were completely lost in Manchester through 
taking a wrong turn, and at length found ourself in a 
part of the town more abundant in people than in wealth. 
We stopped an old woman, and asked her the way to 
the Cathedral, a central point which, as we thought, 
might be familiar to both of us. 1 The Casino ! ’ she 
exclaimed,—‘ the Casino ! Here, Sally, Betty, his ho¬ 
nour wants the Casino ! ’ Now, the Casino is scarcely a 
place for a respectable gentleman to be seen at, especially 
on a Sunday evening; so we protested vehemently 
against her interpretation of our words, repeating once 
or twice, 1 The Cathedral! the Cathedral ! ’ Still, the 
three persisted in making it the Casino, and in asking 
each passer-by where it was, till they had gathered a 
crowd of some dozen dames around us—one saying that 
the Casino was here, and a second there, and a third in 
an entirely different direction, but all very anxious that 
we should find our way to the Casino. 

A generous and liberal spirit too is frequently 
manifested among the working classes, and especially 
is this observable towards those who are in distress 
among them. We are not alluding particularly to the 
present pressure; this pleasing trait is noticeable at 
all times. Into the hat of the beggar, often a worth¬ 
less character, we see them drop their halfpennies 
very freely, when they are carrying home their wages; 
and they who are members of a religious communion, 


FACTORY OPERATIVES. 


297 


and as such among the best of their class, are extremely 
liberal, according to their means, in promoting any 
society which has for its object the temporal and 
spiritual welfare of their fellow-creatures. At the 
present season of distress too, they who are in full 
employment are among the most willing and generous 
contributors to the aid of their suffering fellows. 

We have observed another characteristic of working 
people in our manufacturing towns, which is much to 
be commended—namely, an assiduous attention to those 
in their families who are sick. We mean not to say 
that this trait is universally found among them ; such a 
statement would be very far from correct. Still, it is 
not uncommon to find great kindness and sympathy 
shown to a son or daughter, a brother or sister, a father 
or mother, who has become hopelessly ill. This may 
seem to be no more than the common dictate of natural 
feeling; but attention to an invalid in a poor family, it 
must be remembered, is a much severer test of patience 
and sympathy than in the households of the wealthy. 
In the dwelling of the rich man the wheel of life turns 
round as usual, even though one be there who is draw¬ 
ing nigh to the grave: servants are in attendance; 
rooms with every appliance are set apart for the invalid; 
the family can scarcely be considered incommoded at all. 
No stranger would say that the cloud of sickness was 
brooding over that house. But it is very different 
among the poor; their time is fully employed, even 
when all are well; their rooms are few, and the occu¬ 
pation of one by an invalid is a deprivation; in the sick 


298 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


person there is probably a loss of earnings also, as well 
as an addition of inconvenience. And yet we have often 
observed among them, that every trial has been willingly 
undergone, even during a long illness, in order to miti¬ 
gate the pain and lighten the weariness of the sufferer; 
and we have remarked too, that the loss has been re¬ 
garded with genuine sorrow, even when the removal of 
the invalid has relieved them from the necessity of much 
personal privation and self-denial. 

We might extend our catalogue of the commendable 
qualities to be found among our industrial classes ; but 
after all, as we are wishful to convey the whole truth, 
we should have to enumerate others which are less 
attractive. There is a moral chiaroscuro, a shadow as 
well as a sunshine, which must be given to the picture, 
if it is to be complete. Among the most prominent 
evils to be found in our working populations, we need 
scarcely mention that of intemperance. The reports of 
gaol-chaplains, the records of our courts of justice, the 
charges of our judges, all testify to its prevalence. But 
we need no such testimonies: we who live in large 
towns see too many illustrations of drunkenness and its 
effects, in our daily walk, to require extraneous evidence. 
We see them along our streets; we hear them from the 
brawls of the beer-shop and gin-palace; we observe 
them in wretched homes, poverty-stricken parents, and 
ragged children. The evil, we know, is not confined to 
the working classes; many a man of wealth dies of de¬ 
lirium tremens; many a tradesman goes to bed every 
night in a state of intoxication; many a farmer never 


FACTOBY OPEBATIVES. 


299 


returns sober from the market: still, among our manu¬ 
facturing population it is seen in its worst form, and 
with its sorest consequences. By it the health of a 
working-man, which is his subsistence, is ruined; the 
bread of his children is cast to the dogs; his wife lives 
in misery, and then sinks into recklessness; and his 
whole household is pervaded with an atmosphere of 
ignorance, wickedness, and social degradation. 

A family can hardly be expected to grow up in 
respectability where the father, and perhaps the mother 
also, are drunkards; their example must be productive, 
it might be supposed, of every species of misery to those 
around them, and lead the children gradually as they 
grow up into the same fatal course. This doubtless is 
often the case; and yet, strange as it may seem, the 
parental example has frequently the very opposite effect 
upon the family ; it teaches them prudence through the 
very exhibition of wretchedness. We have observed 
this in the young people that remain at their homes, as 
well as those who are lodging apart from their parents 
on account of domestic brawls and fightings—a numerous 
class. The very misery that has been so long in their 
sight, especially if they are under any course of religious 
instruction, as members of a Sunday-school or attend¬ 
ants at a place of worship, teaches them after a stern 
fashion, like the exhibition of the Spartan slave, that to 
transgress the limits of sobriety is the first step to ruin. 
They consequently become members of Bands of Hope 
and Total Abstinence Societies, and rigid disciples of the 
temperance creed. Many may regard such associations 


300 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


with disfavour; but on the whole, we are assured, they 
have been very useful. They who join them, it is true, 
often become crotchety and self-conceited, sometimes 
making the rules of their club the law of their religion; 
they are mostly, too, very intolerant even of moderate 
livers who do not subscribe to their doctrines. Still, we 
cannot doubt but that such associations have done good 
service in our manufacturing districts. They must be 
looked upon as instituted, not to regulate the conduct 
of temperate men, but to meet an exceptional state of 
society; and though the water-drinker, as officers of 
insurance-companies tell us, is not the longest liver on 
an average, it must be admitted that if you can bind 
down one to the use of water only, who might otherwise 
have rushed into the opposite extreme, you are certainly 
his benefactor personally, and you are conferring a boon 
on his family and the neighbourhood where he resides. 

With the drinking propensity of our people is closely 
associated the charge of improvidence which is so often 
brought against them. We do not deny that they might 
be more prudent stewards of their means; many, as we 
have seen, dissipate their earnings in a reckless and dis¬ 
graceful manner. On the whole however, we think 
that a somewhat too-sweeping condemnation is passed 
upon our working classes for their want of forethought 
and care. So far as our own observation goes, the 
common charge against the young women of extrava¬ 
gance in dress is unfounded. Among the better orders 
of them, we have never remarked any other than a be¬ 
coming and consistent taste in this particular; among 


FACTORY OPERATIVES. 


301 


the lower, there may be vulgarity and absurdity in their 
attire, but there cannot be much extravagance. Besides, 
many of our workpeople toil hardly for their money, 
and lay it up with a proper sense of its value. They 
become depositors in the Savings-bank, or members of 
a Building Society, adding a monthly sum to their store. 
Thus, by degrees they accumulate a fund which ena¬ 
bles them to launch out as masters into their own trade, 
or to enter into business as shopkeepers; or through 
Building Societies they become at length owners of 
cottage property sufficient for their support in old age. 
In some towns the provident workman invests his 
savings in co-operative associations, which are now be¬ 
coming general, and are said to be successful. While, 
therefore, we admit that a great want of forethought 
may be found among our operative classes, we must not 
forget, on the other hand, that there are many instances 
of an industrious and saving disposition among them. 
It must not for a moment be supposed, as some seem to 
speak, that our working men are one and all chargeable 
with improvidence, and that they alone are obnoxious 
to the charge. What say the strong boxes of our 
bankers, the archives of our lawyers, the ledgers of our 
tradesmen, and the records of our Bankruptcy Courts ? 
There are dukes and earls, lords-lieutenant and high- 
sheriffs, landowners and millowners, merchants and 
professional men, who may be ranked in the category 
of the improvident, as well as the artisan and factory 
operative, and with far less excuse. 

As closely allied to habits of unthriftiness, an igno- 


302 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


ranee of all system of domestic economy, or an indiffer¬ 
ence to it, is frequently brought as a charge against the 
wives of our workmen. Here too we would beg our 
readers not to accept the condemnation without reserve. 
Daily labour in the factory doubtless is not the best 
school for household duties; but, it must be remem¬ 
bered, the management of a cottage does not demand 
any very enlarged acquaintance with the intricacies 
of housekeeping and cookery. Besides, so far as we 
could ever ascertain, we do not imagine that the culinary 
schemes of our philanthropists would answer very well 
among our working classes. M. Alexis Soyer might 
have luxuriated in cooking for a regiment or a club, but 
his recipes would not be very suitable for the homes of 
our poor people. In respectable operative families the 
young women are brought up to household work, and 
their shorter hours of labour have afforded them of late 
years more opportunities for acquiring a practical ac¬ 
quaintance with home-duties. There are undeniably 
very many households where waste, carelessness, extra¬ 
vagance, and dirt are the prominent characteristics ; but 
the statement from which we started must ever be borne 
in mind—that there are several grades among our in¬ 
dustrial classes; and we may conclude that, according 
to their rank, so will be their domestic economy.* 

[* The following extract from a paper published by the 
‘ Manchester Education Aid Society ’ shows how little many 
of the young women who work in factories know of things 
relating to domestic management, but it does not contravene 
what we have written above.' It refers to a sewing-school under 


FACTORY OPERATIVES. 


303 


Early marriages have a direct bearing on domestic 
economy; and we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that 
they are far too frequent. They follow upon the pecu¬ 
liar condition of society among our manufacturing popu¬ 
lations. The young women are often without the gui¬ 
dance and protection of parents; then there are none 
of those stiff conventionalities of life among them, which 
are found in the higher grades of society; they are 
thrown together at their work and at their Sunday- 
schools ; at fifteen or sixteen they are often able to sup¬ 
port themselves. So that many begin to 1 keep company’ 
at the early age of fourteen, and are proud of being 
beaux and belles sufficiently attractive to captivate ad- 


the control of the ‘ Manchester District Provident Society ’ during 
the late distress :— 

‘ The total number of young women, factory-workers, from 16 
to 23 years of age, that have passed through this school, is 963. 
They were instructed by ladies who gave their time and labour 
to the benevolent work. Of the 963 there were only 199 who 
could both read and write; 319 more of them were able to read, 
but 445, or nearly half of the whole, were unable to read at all. 
But what is still more important to those likely soon to become 
mothers of families is, that not one in ten of these young women 
could sew, in any available way; and not more than one in twenty 
could sew moderately well. They required to be taught even to 
hold the needle, and were made to practise first on patchwork 
provided for the purpose, which was frequently so badly sewed 
as tQ need unstitching after their attempts. Of domestic manage¬ 
ment they were entirely ignorant. They were unable to cook 
the simplest kind of food. It was very difficult to teach them 
to peel potatoes without excessive wastefulness. And not a 
single girl knew how to make bread.’—1866.] 


304 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


mirers. We once asked a young married woman how 
long she had been acquainted with her husband. 
‘ Ever since I can remember,’ she said. 1 And were 
you engaged ever since you can remember ? ’ ‘Well, 
John and me kept company ever since I can think.’ 
1 When did John propose to you, if it’s a fair question? ’ 
we inquired. 1 He never proposed at all,’ she answered, 
without any reserve; * he kept company with no one 
else, and I kept company with no one else; so, you see, 
we took it for granted.’ This, we have learned, is a 
very common rationale of courtship and marriage among 
our young people. A few weeks since we said to a 
youth after his marriage, 1 1 suppose you have now 
finished your probation, and got fixed for better and 
worse? ’ 1 Yes, sir,’ he replied good-humouredly, 1 and 

it’s about time I should, for I’ve had about a thousand 
miles of courting,’ meaning that from beginning to end 
he had walked his young lady out about that distance. 

The question of marriage is a very important one as 
influencing the condition of our working people. That 
event is the crisis in the lives of the young women. 
Some marriages are followed by comfort and respecta¬ 
bility, where the family is brought up well, and society 
is improved. But it frequently happens that the wife 
sinks under her domestic cares into a kind of recklessness. 
Young women who, while unmarried, were cheerful, 
neat, almost elegant in appearance, as well as regular in 
attendance at public worship, and respectable in every 
duty of life, often change by degrees, under the pressure 
of family trials, till they lose all sense of what is becom- 


FACTORY OPERATIVES. 


305 


ing both in appearance and in conduct. Do not how¬ 
ever judge too hardly, even in such cases as these, ye 
who ‘ dwell in your ceiled houses.’ The husband may 
prove but an indifferent one, and means of living may 
become limited. Then, after a time, children are born; 
and there is no nurse but the mother to look after them. 
Thus she is bound down to her house ; and as the family 
increases, cares increase. We believe that many a 
young woman struggles hard to maintain her position in 
life after marriage, but is gradually compelled to suc¬ 
cumb to the force of circumstances, and eventually to 
give up the contest. 

Such is the estimate we have formed of our operative 
classes, after an intercourse of twenty years with every 
rank and degree among them, from those in the dark 
•unventilated cellar to those in the airy suburban dwelling. 
If you compare, as some do, their moral and social con¬ 
dition with a certain ideal standard of excellence, you 
will doubtless find it low enough in the scale; if you 
compare it with society as it exists, making due allow¬ 
ance for peculiar disadvantages, you will discover that 
it contains the same elements of good and evil as any 
other social grade. If our operatives are deficient in 
some moral qualities, they excel in others. From the 
better class of them there is but a very small percentage 
of the . criminals of our country ; and the fact that 
crime is not increased by poverty, as is evidenced at the 
present period, proves that the principle of honesty is 
not an unstable one among them. There is a scum of 
society which supplies the cases for our courts of justice; 

VOL. II. X 


306 


OUR COTTON TRADE AND 


but this is not affected for good or ill by depression in 
trade. And in firm endurance our working people stand 
out from every other class ; they are enabled by habit 
to live on very little, and the precarious state of em¬ 
ployment at most periods has brought them to look 
want boldly in the face. We mean not that the endur¬ 
ance of all is that patient resignation which springs out 
of reflection and a sense of moral duty; it is frequently 
nothing more than a sullen indifference to passing want, 
as a result of habit or absence of thought: the various 
classes and characters we have attempted to describe, 
will feel according to their several modes of thought and 
positions in life. On the whole, however, it may be said 
that they can, one and all, pass through seasons of tem¬ 
porary privation with surprising equanimity. 

And now we trust that they will summon into action 
their utmost powers of endurance; for winter is at hand, 
rand, whatever men high in office may say, the trials of 
privation will only increase with the inclemency of the 
season. An empty stomach and a bare back are but 
.miserable attendants wherewith to meet the frosts and 
t-anows of December and January. Nay, when are we 
-to look for relief? Cotton is not grown in a day; and 
this wretched war between the Northern and Southern 
States of America will apparently go on in all its inter¬ 
necine ferocity, till the blood of their best sons has been 
poured out like water, and exhaustion at length ensues 
on one side or the other. 

And while we exhort our working classes to bear 
manfully the visitation which cannot be averted, we are 


FACTORY OPERATIVES. 


307 


convinced that there will be sympathising hearts to 
cheer them and strong arms to uphold them. Let the 
operatives be true to themselves in peacefulness, sub¬ 
mission, and rectitude, and those without their pale will 
be true to them. The distress will continue and pro¬ 
bably increase through the winter; but the nation has 
a generous heart, and Lancashire men are not cowards 
and sluggards, to lie down in the mire and call upon 
Hercules to help their waggon out of the rut. 

And let us, in conclusion, again warn those who know 
nothing of our county and its people, to be on their 
guard against the many sensational narratives and de¬ 
scriptions which are now beginning to teem in our news¬ 
papers. A gentleman, it may be, who has never been 
in a manufacturing town before, rests a day in one, on 
his journey northward ; and straightway he has a call 
to write a long letter to one of the metropolitan jour¬ 
nals. Or some young man from one of our manufac¬ 
turing tOAvns, who is emulous of literary distinction, 
writes to the * Times,’ and, being taken in hand by that 
influential paper, is encouraged in the sensational style. 
Or a Special Correspondent goes down to gather infor¬ 
mation for one of the London journals, and he makes a 
point of describing minutely what he has seen in his 
visitations from cottage to cottage, even to the spout of 
a teapot or the ingredients of oatmeal porridge. And 
thus, there is presented to the public a succession of 
stage-scenes painted after that rough and exaggerated 
fashion which will only bear to be looked upon from a 
distance. We are alarmed therefore, lest we be deluged 
x 2 


308 


OUR COTTON TRADE. 


with this overflowing surge of sentiment. Let our 
countrymen render their aid, 1 not grudgingly or of 
necessity,’ but cheerfully and bountifully; let them be 
assured that they are giving to those who stand in need 
of their assistance ; and let them rely confidently upon 
this, that there are those at the scene of distress who 
will make a right use of their contributions, and will 
not stand by in listlessness, while they see their fellow- 
creatures perishing of hunger, even though those suffer¬ 
ing brothers and sisters be in the lowest ranks of social 
life. 


309 


vnr. 

LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 

-♦— 

Lancashire, more than other counties, is marked by 
social extremes: at one time, it is riding on in the 
height of prosperity; at another, it is sunk in the 
depth of distress. When its trade is buoyant, and 
money is circulating rapidly among its people; when 
its furnaces are roaring, and its anvils are ringing, and 
its machinery is rumbling ; when its vessels are sailing 
from its ports laden with their merchandise, and return¬ 
ing with rich cargoes from distant shores ;—this county 
is looked upon from a distance with a mixture of admi¬ 
ration and jealousy, as a hive of industry, and an El 
Dorado of wealth. It is an object of envy for its many 
natural advantages—its coal, its iron, its streams—and 
above all for that energy, and skill, and invention 
which can mould these materials into agents of incal¬ 
culable power. It is an object of envy, mingled perhaps 
with something like contempt, as our merchants and 
manufacturers rise from small beginnings into million¬ 
aires, and, after devoting more attention to barter and 



310 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD . 


the ledger than to refinement and the graces, settle in 
the great mansions and on the broad lands which were 
once held, but improvidently squandered, by our noble¬ 
men and county aristocrats, who lived in luxury and 
ease, and knew not the meaning of a balance-sheet. On 
the other hand, Lancashire in its distress becomes an 
object of pity. When one apparently insignificant 
staple of trade has been cut off; when the ports of one 
country have been closed to us; when a single nation 
rises in civil war, and withholds its products,—the 
hum of employment ceases among us, and gaunt 
famine enters our homes: he who was lately luxuria¬ 
ting in abundance, curtails his expenditure in alarm; 
he who was living in comfort, experiences the pinchings 
of poverty ; and he who was just above want, sinks into 
the abyss of pauperism. In its prosperity, Lancashire 
is the world’s envy; in its distress, it is the world’s pity. 

In the number for September, 1862, we endeavoured 
to describe in Fraser's Magazine the most salient 
characteristics of our operative classes, and the general 
condition in which they then were.* A year has now 
elapsed since that article was written ; and it may not 
be altogether uninteresting, especially to those at a 
distance, if we take a review of the scenes through 
which we have passed during that time—if we glance 
at the position in which we now find ourselves, and if 
we venture to look onward, however diffidently, into 
the season of winter, which is again looming before us. 


* Our Cotton Trade and Factory Operatives, p. 271. 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


311 


When we last wrote, the clouds were gathering darkly 
around, but the storm had not fairly burst upon us. 
This miserable war across the Atlantic had then been 
carried on for more than twelve months, and our com¬ 
mercial distress had been on the increase; but it had 
by no means reached its height,—we were then only at 
the entrance of the dark valley. During the last four 
months of the year the gloom increased in intensity, 
commerce became more and more paralysed, cotton 
dearer and dearer, work scarcer and scarcer, the unem¬ 
ployed more and more numerous, the idlers who did 
not wish to work, more and more importunate; till at 
Christmas our trade had sunk into the lowest deep of 
torpor and depression, and our operative populations 
were in the darkest gorge of the shadow of death. 

But during this time it must not be supposed that 
we sat with our arms folded, and awaited our doom 
in sullenness. This is not the fashion of Lancashire. 
Whatever the natives of our county may be in other 
respects, they are men of action : whatever their hands 
find to do, they do it with all their might; they neither 
shrink from work nor sink under danger; and now 
they girded themselves for the struggle that was before 
them. Temporary distress, even in its severest form, 
they had experienced before; but now they had to face 
it in an intensity of pressure and a length of duration 
that had known no parallel. Still they were equal to 
the arduous task. Nobleman and merchant, clergyman 
and layman, tradesman and operative, joined hand to 
hand, and formed a closely linked chain to rescue the 


312 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


hundreds of thousands that were stranded on the bare 
rocks of want, and were in danger of perishing in 
the general wreck of the vessel of trade. And then 
with what marvellous liberality were contributions of 
all kinds and from all parts poured in to our aid ! The 
echoes of sympathy were awoke not only in the palace, 
mansion, and cottage of our land, but they reached us 
from the far East and from the far West—nay, from 
lands which are to us literally the very ends of the earth. 
Canada, Australia, India, New Zealand—all contributed 
to our assistance, not simply as a return for the benefits 
Lancashire had conferred on them by its merchandise, 
but as a filial acknowledgment of affection towards their 
mother-country, and an earnest of good-will towards 
their suffering brothers and sisters; while help came 
from peoples upon whom we had no such claim—from 
shores and islands so distant and obscure, that we had 
scarcely heard of them as emerging into the light of 
civilisation.* If this ordeal through which we are 
passing teach us no other lesson, it must convince us 
that the human heart conceals within it a fountain of 
benevolence, which is ever ready to flow forth in living 
streams at the touch of undeserved suffering and un¬ 
avoidable affliction. 

Towards the latter end of the year an influential county 
meeting was held in Manchester, for the purpose of sti¬ 
mulating the liberality of the public, and at the same 

* The following statement of contributions, taken from the 
balance-sheet of the Central Executive Committee, just published, 
may not be without interest:— 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


313 


time of removing some unfavourable impressions that 
were entertained in the country in regard to the conduct 
of the manufacturers. It was presided over by the Lord- 
Lieutenant, the Earl of Sefton, who, though a young 
man and inexperienced in Such public meetings, went 
through his part in a graceful and becoming manner. 
It was attended by the principal nobility and gentry of 
Lancashire and the distressed districts adjacent, as well 
as by our merchants and manufacturers. It will be 
acknowledged to have been a success, when we state 
that upwards of 70,000Z. were subscribed in the room ; 
landowner, merchant, and manufacturer vying with 
each other in the largeness of their donations. The 
Earl of Derby, as Chairman of the Central Executive 
Committee, was there, and was of course the chief 
To Foreign and Colonial Subscriptions, viz. 



£ 

s. 

d. 


£ 

s. 

d. 

Australia (includ¬ 




Gibraltar . . 

105 

16 

0 

ing New South 




Russia . . . 

716 

14 

3 

Wales) . . . 

51,980 

17 

0 

South America . 

1,526 

12 

11 

Nova Scotia . . 

5,280 

0 

0 

Austria . . . 

207 

14 

8 

China .... 

2,056 

2 

6 

Africa.... 

267 

17 

10 

India .... 

1,867 

6 

1 

Newfoundland . 

313 

7 

1 

Canada . . . 

2,467 

7 

3 

Smyrna . . . 

728 

16 

0 

Cape of Good 




New Zealand . 

2,499 

15 

0 

Hope . . . 

2,084 

10 

3 

West Indies. . 

2,664 

11 

9 

Germany. . . 

1,032 

1 

0 

North America. 

1,000 

0 

0 

France . . . 

1,239 

4 

6 

Java .... 

283 

16 

8 

The Brazils . . 

4,622 

11 

4 

The Sandwich 




Turkey . . . 

793 

4 

0 

Islands . . 

755 

0 

0 

Egypt. . . . 

1,527 

3 

0 

Madeira and 




Italy .... 

767 

8 

7 

sundry for¬ 




Holland . . . 

556 

5 

6 

eign . . . 

993 

4 

2 

Spain .... 

230 

16 

2 

£88,568 

3 

6 







314 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


speaker. Indeed, lie left but little else to be said in bis 
pathetic pleadings for the unemployed, and his eloquent 
defence of the manufacturers as a body. It is pleasant 
to see a nobleman of his high rank and station taking 
the position he has done in this crisis; it looks like a 
revival of old English times and feelings, when our aris¬ 
tocracy were acknowledged as our national leaders. 
Before the opening of Parliament the Earl of Derby 
attended regularly the weekly meetings of the Central 
Committee, and applied his powers of organisation and 
administration diligently to its business. From the 
commencement of this distress indeed, he has mani¬ 
fested a watchful interest in devising the best plans for 
its relief, and he has thereby won the good opinion of 
both rich and poor. Few men have been blest with 
more enviable gifts than he, socially and mentally. Of 
ancient lineage, of enormous rentroll, of unsurpassed 
intellectual endowments, he has yet gained another title 
to distinction, equally to be desired by the wise and 
good, in that he has joined in the less ambitious, but no 
less honourable duty, of devising a means of relief for 
those who are indigent and needy through no fault of 
their own. How like, and yet how unlike, are the father 
and the son when they appear together on a platform, 
as on this occasion they did! In general aspect they 
resemble each other most closely, and yet their indi¬ 
vidual features are unlike. So in their mental and 
moral qualities there is a general resemblance : the com¬ 
bined powers of each achieve similar results; but those 
powers are individually widely diverse. * The intellect 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


315 


of the father is quick, clear and penetrating, compre¬ 
hending a subject as it were by intuition ; that of the 
son requires more time and preparation for fully master¬ 
ing a question : the father was born an orator; the son 
has to win the title with some difficulty and labour : 
the father is, or was, somewhat impetuous and fiery in 
temper; the son is rather cold and unimpassioned : the 
mind of the father is stored with much knowledge, and 
we wonder how he acquired it; that of the son too is 
well furnished, but we know that it has been gathered 
by patient watching and study. And yet the parent 
and the son resemble each other in the usefulness and 
order resulting from the combination of their mental 
and moral faculties, even as a marvellous likeness in the 
general aspect of their countenances is produced out of 
features and lineaments individually bearing to each 
other but a slight resemblance. 

When the Earl of Derby took great pains to defend 
the manufacturers from the charge of niggardliness, he 
and the Central Committee were apprehensive lest the 
accusation, if uncontradicted and undisproved, might 
congeal at once the stream of benevolence that was then 
flowing copiously. As in charges and refutations of this 
kind generally, there were probably exaggerated state¬ 
ments on both sides. There have been instances of a 
noble generosity in the manufacturers; cases, again, of 
great selfishness might be cited against them : but, we 
apprehend, the bulk of them have acted with a reason¬ 
able view to their own interests, without overlooking 
the welfare of their work-people. No manufacturer 


316 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD . 


would willingly discharge his operatives, even for his 
own sake; but when we are ostentatiously told of mills 
running to a great loss, we would not wish to be rude, 
but we must be permitted to doubt the accuracy of the 
statement. We hear frequently—more frequently in' 
the House of Commons than in our marts of commerce 
—that the manufacturers have lost many thousands a 
year by keeping their mills at work. First, what is 
meant by the expression 1 lost ? ’ There is danger of 
what logicians call ‘ an ambiguous middle ’ in the 
syllogism. Take the legitimate trade-meaning of the 
term. Suppose a manufacturer has 50,000/. in his 
concern : calculating five per cent, on that sum, he puts 
down 2,500/.; but, as a part of this capital, the machinery 
is valued at 20,000/.; reckoning the interest on this at 
ten per cent., as subject to wear and tear, he adds 1,000/.: 
so that, on his 50,000/., he calculates 3,500/. as interest. 
This, observe, does not come into the account of profit. 
Whatever is absolutely netted over and above the 3,500/. 
is profit; whatever falls below that sum is loss. Now, 
it is possible that, from miscalculation in the waste of 
cotton or other reasons, there may have been in some 
cases a loss; it is quite conceivable, too, that a manu¬ 
facturer, in order to keep his operatives together and 
his machinery going, will consent to a reduction for a 
time in the above rate of interest on his capital; but we 
cannot suppose that any man of business will knowingly 
run his mill to an absolute loss of his legitimate interest. 
Indeed, we have reason to believe that those mills which 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


317 


have not stopped have worked to a small profit, the ces¬ 
sation of others giving them an advantage.* 

The nature of the manufacturer, we may be assured, 
is in the main like that of other men : no doubt he 
acquires, as with most people, a few peculiarities from 
his position. Viewed as a type of the class, he has a 
certain brusqueness of manner, being indurated with 
much barter and occasional disputations with many 
work-people. On the other hand, he is far from being 
an unkind or illiberal man. He is energetic at his mill, 
and hospitable at his home ; he has a good deal of the 
milk of human kindness under a rough cocoa-nut husk; 
and from the flow of money which, like an unceasing 
stream, is passing through his hands, he is brought to 
grasp it with less tenacity than one who has a settled 
income, and has to live carefully within it.f 

* The terms ‘profit’ and Toss’ are sometimes used in a more 
imaginary sense. When a manufacturer has not * made ’ up to his 
calculations, in loose verbiage he calls it a loss. We heard of an 
old gentleman bemoaning himself, in that he had ‘ lost ’ eight 
thousand pounds in one year by his mills; when some one ini¬ 
tiated in the trade begged to ask him how it was possible. ‘ How 
possible ? ’ was the explanation; ‘ don’t you see ? If things had 
gone on well, I should have made ten thousand pounds, whereas 
I have only gained two.’ 

f We do not think that the charge against the manufacturers 
of building new mills in this season of distress carries with it 
much weight. Previous to the present crisis trade had been for 
some time unusually prosperous, and consequently on the cessa¬ 
tion of work many of the millowners had a large capital idle. 
Now, if you were to recommend such as they to invest their 
money in the Consols, or at four per cent, in railway debentures, 
they would regard you as a fit subject for a commission of lunacy. 


318 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


Up to the present time there have been two reservoirs 
for the reception and distribution of the thousand rills 
of charity that have poured down upon us—the Central 
Executive Committee, which holds its meetings in Man¬ 
chester, and that presided over by the Lord Mayor of 
London, called the Mansion House Committee. A 
strenuous and continued effort was made to amalgamate 
the two; it was thought that it would prevent irregu¬ 
larities, and. conduce to more uniformity of principle and 
action, if the Committee sitting in Manchester were the 
central depositary of power, and had the sole distribution 
of the funds; it was alleged that instances of unbecoming 
extravagance had occurred from the twofold channel of 
distribution. In these arguments and statements there 
might be some reason. Still, let the truth be fairly 
spoken: in the condition wherein we found ourselves 
during the closing months of last year, we know not 
what we could have done but for the liberal aid rendered 
us by the Mansion House Committee. We were in¬ 
volved in circumstances of great difficulty and trial, 
suddenly and unexpectedly ; we were surrounded by 
suffering thousands, and the numbers of the unemployed 

Trade they must have. At a time like this, too, it is said that 
mills may he built and filled with machinery at a much cheaper 
rate, and in a more durable manner, than in busy seasons. Then 
there has very strangely been all along a floating impression 
among our manufacturers, that there may come over by any 
packet an announcement that hostilities have ceased or are sus¬ 
pended in America. It is singular how long and how tenaciously 
this expectation has been entertained, even in the face of every 
reasonable probability. 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


319 


were increasing from week to week; we were in an en¬ 
tirely novel position, and we could not see our way any 
distance before us. Then the whole country was urging 
us to give abundantly to those who were out of work; 
pressure was laid equally on Boards of guardians as on 
relief committees; the labour that devolved on us too 
was very heavy, and the pecuniary responsibility not 
inconsiderable. So that we must ever regard with 
grateful feelings the ungrudging liberality that was 
exercised by the Mansion House Committee: their 
grants were made freely, and in our application for 
them we were not too much trammelled by red-tapeism. 
We are assured that if it had not been for their ready 
aid, many of the relief committees would have been 
broken up or suspended. In bearing this testimony 
however to the sustaining influence of the Mansion 
House Committee, we speak of that exceptional state 
of embarrassment through which we have passed; for 
the future we should much prefer one central depositary 
of control to two co-ordinate committees, having each 
an independent management of charitable funds. 

It may savour somewhat of a paradox, but it is quite 
true, that the difficulty did not consist so much in 
collecting the streams of charity into these two large 
reservoirs as in distributing them again into fitting 
channels, thence to be divided into smaller ducts, as in 
the arterial process of the human system. From the 
two central associations funds were disbursed to the 
various relief committees throughout the distressed 
districts according to their wants; and it was only 


320 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


when the money reached these smaller organisations, to 
be dispensed to families and individuals, that the main 
difficulty confronted you. It may seem a simple pro¬ 
cess to distribute charitable funds which have been 
intrusted to you; but it is really very hard to do so 
equitably and conscientiously over a large district, even 
with the help of paid inspection and personal visitation. 
It is easy enough doubtless to scatter the money intrusted 
to you with a lavish hand, without any scruples about 
the character and condition of those whom you aid; but 
if you are actuated by a sense of what is due to the 
original donor as well as to the recipient, you will find 
yourself engaged in no light undertaking. Imagine a 
district of some twenty thousand inhabitants, as placed 
under a relief committee. It may contain seven thou¬ 
sand dependent on the cotton manufacture, the class 
most easily dealt with; but the rest are of a miscel¬ 
laneous order—hawkers, porters, tailors, shoemakers, 
slipper-makers, carters, labourers, jobbers, needlewomen, 
charwomen, and aged people, with a still lower stratum 
—mainly Irish—which would be classed under the head 
of 1 no business in particular.’ And yet all are claim¬ 
ants for relief; the most deserving ever the most 
reluctant to seek it, the least deserving ever the most 
importunate : every trick is practised by some—those 
chiefly who have reduced begging to a kind of science— 
to get their share in the general scramble ; and thus the 
nicest discrimination combined with great moral firm¬ 
ness is required, in order to do justly, and at the same 
time to act with mercy. 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD . 


321 


And among those who are strictly speaking mill- 
operatives, it must not he supposed that all feel alike, 
even under the same weight of pressure. In sen¬ 
sibility to suffering there is a great difference among 
them, according to the character of the individual 
or the family. Some go for parochial aid without 
any great degree of sensitiveness, and can rough the 
jostling with relieving officers and Boards of Guar¬ 
dians without much shrinking; though this is rather an 
Irish than an English characteristic. Others will bear 
the keenest pinchings of poverty without allowing even 
friends to know that they are in want. We have often 
observed this in the respectable class of young women 
upon whom depends the support of the house. When 
two or three are earning their ten shillings a week each, 
they can live respectably ; but their wages, suppose, 
sink to one half, perhaps to a quarter—then comes the 
pinch ; and yet we have found sometimes that they will 
live in the most sparing manner, in order to maintain 
an outward appearance of respectability; and probably 
one who might wish to render assistance to such will 
first discover their disguised penury from the fading 
colour on their cheeks, indicating a want of necessary 
food. Some of our work-people, again, bear privation 
with a sullen endurance; they have never been provi¬ 
dent, and they cannot come out of the furnace much 
worse than they went in, if only they can subsist at all: 
others have prided themselves on their honest indepen¬ 
dence and provident habits; they have probably laid 
up money in the Savings’ bank, or put it out in some 
VOL. II. * 


322 


LANCASHIBE UNDEB A CLOUD. 


other investment; they live in comfortable houses; they 
have gathered round them a sufficient stock of substan¬ 
tial furniture ; their families have good clothes for week¬ 
day and Sunday. In such households as these the con¬ 
flict is intense ; and the more so, inasmuch as it is the 
struggle of sensibility rather than of material want. 
Investments are sinking, furniture is going, clothes are 
disappearing, and this gradual deterioration is accom¬ 
panied by that dignified pride which shrinks from an 
appearance, much more a parade of poverty. Such 
cases as these it is always most difficult to relieve, while 
most of all they claim the moral and substantial sympa¬ 
thy of every benevolent heart.* 

It would not have been right to have limited our 
charity during the last winter j - to the cotton-operatives, 
for the depression in trade affected the whole working 
population. ‘ Why, what difference can these times 
make to you ? ’ we inquired of a little bustling barber 
who was seeking aid. ‘ Don’t you see, sir,’ he answered 
with some importance, ‘my customers who used to 
shave three times a week now shave only twice, and 
those that shaved twice now only shave once ; it’s a 
loss, sir, of five-and-forty per cent, on my income.’ 
And he seemed to assume as much importance as if he 
received less weekly by five hundred pounds instead of 

* In the five towns of Preston, Blackburn, Wigan, Ashton, and 
Stockport 57,273 1. were drawn out of the Savings’ banks during 
the six months ending June, 1863, absolutely to provide the 
necessaries of life. 

f [Written in 1863.—1866.] 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


323 


five shillings. A bagpiper applied for help to the com¬ 
mittee of which we are Chairman ; it seemed doubtful 
on what principle he could establish his claim, until one 
of the members suggested that he ‘ wanted to raise the 
wind.’ On one occasion an old woman came forward 
for her dole somewhat tipsy, and when taxed with it, 
she argued with a certain inebriate gravity that she was 
quite sober; she had evidently walked up deluding her¬ 
self with the idea that she was perfectly steady—quaere, 
is this a frame of mind peculiar to the old woman ? 
After a time, her opponent convinced her, in fair argu¬ 
ment, that she had been drinking, when she admitted 
so far, that she had just ‘ broke tee-total.’ It came out, 
however, that whenever the old dame had three-half¬ 
pence in her pocket, she ‘ broke tee-total ’ without fail. 

The operations of a Local Eelief Committee are more 
extensive than one who has never engaged in them 
might suppose. They involve the dispensing of food 
or its equivalent, the distribution of clothing, the man¬ 
agement of the sewing school, and the superintendence 
of classes for free education ; and each of these depart¬ 
ments must come under a distinct sub-committee sub¬ 
servient to the managing body. 

Various plans have been adopted for dispensing food, 
or what is intended for its purchase. Some committees 
have distributed their relief in kind alone; some by 
tickets on the various shopkeepers; some in money. 
This last is a practice deserving of the strongest repro¬ 
bation, inasmuch as that which is intended for the 
sustenance of the family in many cases finds its way 
y 2 


324 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


directly to the alehouse. Soup kitchens too and cheap 
dining-rooms have been very general throughout the 
manufacturing districts. We have tasted the soup in 
the large establishments at Preston and Blackburn, and 
found it remarkably good; it is of a very nutritive 
quality, and though it might not be so delicate in taste, 
or so tempting in appearance, or so neatly served up, as 
that in a gentleman’s dining-room, it has more substan¬ 
tial and strengthening properties in it. These soup 
kitchens and cheap dining establishments have been a 
great support to the poor at this exceptional season : so 
far however as our observation goes, the Lancashire 
operative in the normal state of trade cherishes the 
Englishman’s feeling, and prefers his meals at his own 
house. 

The clothing department of a relief committee is 
attended with considerable labour, and on the whole 
not with the greatest satisfaction. Towards the close 
of last year we had large grants for the distribution of 
bedding and wearing apparel. Much of it was received 
by the poor with thankfulness, and applied to the pur¬ 
pose for which it was intended; but a considerable 
quantity, we fear, found its way in no long time to the 
pawnshops. In the case of many of the recipients it 
was impossible to prevent this mal-appropriation, what¬ 
ever vigilance and stringency were exercised. The use 
of the pawnshop is so very general among our operative 
population that no discredit whatever is attached to it. 
Large bundles also of worn-out articles came down to 
us for distribution; and it was ludicrous to see what 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


325 


strange and inconsistent clearings of the wardrobe were 
unpacked. Here was an admiral’s full dress, with 
cocked hat to match: no doubt it had paced the quarter¬ 
deck one day, and strutted in pride of place and au¬ 
thority. Some wag was for encasing a certain half¬ 
witted lad in it, on which the simple fellow would have 
rejoiced and marched proudly in his uniform and unique 
head-piece; but the salt-water suit was sent to the 
second-hand clothes-dealer for exchange or sale. Here 
again was a pair of decayed satin shoes, which once 
perhaps, enveloping the * light fantastic toe,’ had tripped 
gracefully at Almack’s. Lo ! out pops a pair of buck¬ 
skin breeches, which has no doubt crossed the broad 
fields of Leicestershire on some Jupiter, by Thunderer, 
while the hounds were in full cry. Holla ! here come 
the red coat and the top-boots also. What Nimrod can 
we find among the spindles and shuttles to array in this 
equestrian apparel ? Now a drab top-coat with many 
capes falls upon the floor before us; it has withstood 
wind and rain as it waited impatiently at the door of 
the Opera House or the mansion in Belgrave Square 
for the dilatory family: we must see what the second¬ 
hand elothes-dealer will give us for this many-caped 
relic of other days. Here a soiled dress and a faded 
bonnet—.both of the latest Parisian fashion—are hauled 
out of the clothes-bag. What a depth of degradation, 
to be trimmed up for the ungainly proportions of a 
factory girl, after airing themselves in the Park on those 
graceful shoulders behind those splendid bays! ‘Im¬ 
perial Cassar, turned to dust and clay, stopping a hole 


326 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


to keep the wind away ! ’ We heard of a charwoman 
receiving a satin gown as her share of the booty. 1 And 
what have you made of it, Sally?’ inquired the mistress 
of a house where she was working ; 1 you will look as 
fine as a duchess in it, I expect.’ 1 Well, now, bless 
you, missus,’ replied Sally, ‘ I couldn’t for the life of me, 
for shame to wear it. Fancy me, a washerwoman, in 
satin ! So I sold it for five shillings, and had a jolly 
good spree with it.’ 

In the autumn of last year sewing schools sprang up 
in great numbers throughout the distressed districts, and 
they have done a good work: they have afforded 
a livelihood to very many young women who were 
thrown out of employment; and while they have 
kept them from the temptations incidental to idleness, 
they have been the means of teaching them the use of 
their needle, an accomplishment in which a large por¬ 
tion of them were imperfect. Into these sewing schools 
a very miscellaneous assemblage came together. There 
was the Sunday scholar, who was generally characterised 
by decency, if not refinement of manner; there were 
those who, if they had ever attended a Sunday-school, 
had long ceased to do so,—who were married perhaps, 
and had sunk into a state of listlessness, if not reckless- 
less ; there were those—mainly Irish, it must be 
observed—who had never attended a school in their 
lives, and whose minds seemed to be a total blank so 
far as any educational impressions they had received. 
As we were arranging a class on one occasion, we had 
the following dialogue with a young woman of this last 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD . 


327 


order,—in Lancashire phrase, 1 a big lump of a body,’ 
who would have been a dangerous customer in a row : 

1 Can you sew ? ’—* No.’ ‘ Can you write ? ’—‘ No.’ 

1 Can you spell ? ’—‘ No.’ 1 Can you read ? ’— 1 No.’ 

‘ Do you know your letters ? ’—‘ No.’ 1 Why, what can 
you do ? ’—‘ Don’t know.’ 1 You’re married, I see by 
your finger ? ’— 1 Ay.’ 1 How did any one come to have 
you ? ’—‘ Don’t know.’ From this variety of classes it 
may be imagined that, unless discipline had been kept 
up, confusion would have been the result. On the 
whole however the women behaved satisfactorily : the 
chief disturbances were among the Irish Romanists, and 
occasionally an afiair of honour was adjusted out of 
school in the Sayers fashion; but when it was found 
that this Hibernian way of settling a dispute was followed 
by instant dismissal, the duello was abandoned. There 
was not a very large class of this kind in the schools, 
and they had got in at the first general rush: at one 
time many were admitted who, after the experience 
committees have gained, would now be certainly 
excluded. The larger portion of those who attended 
were decent young women; some of them were very 
respectable and praiseworthy in their conduct through¬ 
out. Their degrees of progress, as it may be supposed, 
were various. Some began with a fair experience in 
the use of the needle, while others commenced by 
handling it as they would wield a poker; some have 
attained to considerable perfection in every kind of 
sewing and fancy work, while others have improved 
but slowly, and have not advanced very far in the art. 


328 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


All however must have acquired the rudimentary prin¬ 
ciples of stitching and patching, which may be so use¬ 
fully applied in every cottage. 

Some local relief committees took advantage of the 
times to give a cheap or gratuitous education to the 
children of those who were receiving aid from them; 
some formed classes for adults. Boards of guardians 
too adopted a school-education, as well as oakum-picking 
and out-door labour on the land, as a test of relief for men 
of all ages. To be sent to school at forty or fifty years 
of age, seemed to many to be turning the fingers of their 
clock a long way back; but, no doubt, some benefit 
has resulted from it, A very old woman told us that 
her lad (about fifty) had gone to school again. She 
was very much puzzled in giving me the title of the 
school. 1 They call’n it,’ she said, c a3 near as I can 
think, a dul—a dul—bert (adult) school; but I never 
was much of a scholard.’ 

That these local committees have invariably acted 
with the soundest judgment and the nicest discrimina¬ 
tion in the administration of relief, we are not prepared 
to say : indeed, it is undeniable that very shameful 
tricks were sometimes practised on them by the most 
undeserving characters, and that numbers who could 
have supported themselves by their work, preferred to 
live in idleness by cheating and overreaching the dis¬ 
pensers of charitable funds. The professional scamp 
had a good opportunity for the exercise of his cunning 
in a populous town like Manchester, which contained 
many local committees. This liability to deception 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


329 


was perhaps inseparable from the state of distraction 
and overwork in which we were so suddenly involved 
towards the close of last year; but it cannot fail to 
make all conscientious and business-like distributors of 
relief extremely cautious in the future management of 
their operations. 

But into whatever errors kind-hearted committee¬ 
men may have fallen, no one can speak in too favourable 
terms of the zeal and energy with which our people 
girded themselves to the work of aiding the unemployed. 
Throughout the distressed districts the clergy assumed 
their natural position as leaders of the movement, and, 
each within his given boundary, assisted to aid the poor 
of every religious denomination. The gentry were not 
backward in rendering their help. The shopkeeper, 
who was often himself a great sufferer by the very 
charity that was administered, joined willingly in the 
work of visiting cases of need, and distributing what 
was necessary for its relief. Most of those, in short, 
who were above want came forward to help, either by 
work or contributions, or by both. The services of the 
Local Relief Committees have not been much recog¬ 
nised : as a rule, they have worked very unostentatiously, 
and been little known beyond their respective districts; 
but the labour they have gone through, and the time 
that has been given up to it, if fully recorded, would 
make many felicitate themselves on their good fortune, 
who have contributed their hundred pounds, and sat 
in their easy chairs through the winter evenings. 

From what we have thus far written it may be 


330 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


inferred that the unemployed were not left unaided in 
their distress. Indeed, if the truth must be told, the 
lowest class of our population were never better fed or 
better clothed in their liyes: even on Christmas-day, 
by the liberality of the Mansion House Committee, 
each poor family had the means provided for a good 
old-English dinner. As you ascended in the scale of 
society you would find many whose circumstances were 
pitiable. The respectable operative or artisan, who in 
ordinary times could make an ample livelihood with 
his family, became in many cases stinted even in the 
necessaries of life ; many of them suffered in feeling as 
well as bodily privation, from a mistaken sense of 
degradation in having to apply for relief. Still 
they were maintained, if not in much comfort, yet 
above positive want. Indeed, the late returns of the 
Registrar-General inform us that the health of the 
manufacturing districts has not deteriorated from the 
prevailing distress : the opportunities for intemperance 
have been curtailed; and probably a change of employ¬ 
ment has in some cases been salutary. They who were 
put to farm-labour by Boards of guardians improved in 
health and condition. 

‘ How well you are looking, Thomas ! ’ we said to a 
poor man of industrious disposition, but not of bright 
intellect: ‘ you are getting quite fat and vigorous,’ as 
indeed he was. 

‘ Why, you see, sir, I’ve turned farmer,’ he replied, 
1 and it seems to agree with my constitution.’ 

1 Turned farmer ! You have surely met with some 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


331 


good luck ! ’ for we knew that he was receiving paro¬ 
chial relief. 

‘ Oh, I mean by that, I work on the farm : they call 
us all farmers; so I’m a farmer.’ 

Rising above the working class we met with suffering 
among all trades. The shopkeeper was necessarily in a 
critical position ; he did but a small business, and that 
often with uncertainty of payment. We know not 
what effect the commercial depression had upon the 
dram-shops and beer-houses : we almost fear that they 
did not suffer much ; but the legitimate innkeeper had 
to share in the general want of custom. 

‘ Why, sir,’ the mistress of a market-house said very 
innocently to us, ‘our customers will sit as long over 
twopence as they did over a shilling : they will spread 
a dobbin of ale over an hour.’ 

And when we entered the warehouses of our mer¬ 
chants we were met with blank faces: calicoes were 
double their normal price, and the country shopkeepers 
were afraid to purchase ; sales were slow and heavy; 
the wholesale dealers dared not keep anything like their 
ordinary stock, for if prices had suddenly come down they 
would have lost perhaps forty per cent, on it. 

* How is trade going with you ? ’ we asked one of our 
merchants about Christmas. 

‘ Oh, bad,’ was the reply, ‘very bad ; grey cloths dull 
and heavy; but, now that they are distributing the chari¬ 
ties, blankets are lively! ’ and on he walked jauntily, not 
stopping to tell us whether he meant that his ‘ blankets 
were lively’ in a commercial or an entomological sense. 


332 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


Probably what we have stated may lead some to sup¬ 
pose that praise has been rather too freely lavished on 
the patient demeanour and peaceable disposition of the 
poor under their trials. We would not detract from the 
credit due to them : they have for the most part taken 
a correct view of their position. Still, the truth must 
be fairly stated here: they had no ground whatever for 
any riotous proceedings during the last winter; the 
most factious could hardly have concocted a justifiable 
complaint. We conceive therefore that the Chancellor 
of the Exchequer, and they who have adopted his tone 
of reasoning, cannot argue from their conduct, with any 
semblance of fitness, for an extension of the franchise. 
If a measure of that kind is to be carried, let it be done 
on its general merits ; but it is folly to reason that our 
people ought to have privileges as a reward for patience, 
when an undue impatience would have been altogether 
unpardonable.* 

* [In the discussions on the Reform Bill, 1866, we perceive that 
some speakers have adopted the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s 
mode of reasoning. We repeat now, that, dark as the times have 
been out of which we are emerging, if the operatives had not 
been peaceful and patient, they would have been among the most 
ungrateful, as well as the most short-sighted, of human beings. 
We are not, for our own part, at all alarmed about a 71. franchise, 
but let the question be argued on its real merits. Indeed, we 
regard this Reform Bill with something like indifference. For how 
does the case actually stand? Among the working classes those 
who are sober, prudent, and industrious, have for the most part a 
vote under the 10£. franchise, and many more might have gained 
it, if it had been a matter of any interest to them. But really 
the great bulk of them care little or nothing about it. A few 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


333 


During the winter, it is true, there were certain indi¬ 
cations of rioting, but not such as to create any great 
alarm. At Manchester there were occasional disputes 
between the Board of Guardians and those who were 
receiving relief, on the question of labour; but these 
evaporated in a few out-door meetings and their con¬ 
comitant speeches. At Preston these contentions 
became more serious; but the Guardians were very 
properly firm, and as the disaffected knew that they 
were prepared for any emergency, no disturbance broke 
out. The riot at Stalybridge alone was attended with 
loss of property ; and it stands forth as an illustration 
of stupid mismanagement from beginning to end in 
those who had to deal with it. First of all, to bring 
into the town a mere handful of soldiers, and then to 
appease the mob by a Mansion House grant, seemed to 
indicate that the leading gentlemen in Stalybridge had 
lost their faculties for a season. Indeed, this part of 
our distressed districts has been marked by an unen- 

noisy, idle, worthless talkers among them are frequently regarded 
as our industrial classes. If Parliament would turn its attention 
to the moral and social amelioration of our working people, it 
would do well; for it is out of such a regeneration alone that 
real good can have its rise. Such questions, we know, stir up 
less ferment on the hustings, and let out less «wind and tongue ’ in 
the House of Commons, than the manufacture of a Parliamentary 
Reform Bill; but they are more important, so far as we can judge. 
Indeed, we have sometimes thought that this outcry about poli¬ 
tical privileges for the people, in many instances, is but little else 
than throwing dust in their eyes, that they may not see the in¬ 
difference which is so frequently shown to their moral and social 
well-being.—1866.] 


334 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


viable notoriety—Stalybridge and Dukinfield for their 
riots, and Ashton-under-Lyne for its unseemly squab¬ 
bles between relief committees. The town of Staly¬ 
bridge is a miserable-looking place at the best, and the 
population even in ordinary times has the appearance 
of being ill-fed, ill-clothed, and altogether of a low 
order; so that if there was to be an outbreak at all, it 
was as likely a place for it as any other. In the case of 
such mobs our own impression is—and we have seen 
several—that if fairly met there is nothing very formid¬ 
able in them. They are composed mainly of women, 
and lads from fourteen to nineteen, with a large admix¬ 
ture of the Irish element, as was the case at Stalybridge; 
and we have often thought that a hundred resolute men 
with broomsticks would scatter several thousands of 
them. The danger from them consists in this—that 
they can spread themselves, and do mischief in one 
part while they are opposed and beaten back in another. 
It is always the most merciful course therefore to bring 
such a force against them at the first outbreak as to dis¬ 
perse them at all parts, and this may be generally 
effected without much damage to life or limb. 

But we turn from our commentary on the past to 
take a glance at our present condition. If we compare 
the state of the manufacturing districts as we find it at 
the end of June, 1863, with what it was in the last 
week of the year 1862, we cannot doubt but that there 
has been a great improvement in the circumstances of 
our people during the interval. Upon this we are left 
in no uncertainty; for even if our personal observation 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


335 


did not lead us to that conclusion, we have now in the 
monthly returns from the Central Executive Committee 
sufficient proof of it. And, as a consequence of this 
gradual increase in employment, we find that forty- 
seven local committees have suspended their opera¬ 
tions, and that many sewing schools have been closed. 

It is often difficult to mark, sometimes to account for, 
the first spring in trade. As you look upon a cornfield 
which seems to be steady and motionless, you observe 
at times that in a certain part the ears begin to move 
tremulously, and that the oscillation extends itself 
gradually, till over the whole field the stalks are 
swayed about by reason of some light breath of air that 
is playing upon them. Almost as imperceptible is the 
first movement of trade as it awakes from its torpor, 
and as gradually too does the revival spread itself from 
individual to individual, and from locality to locality, 
till it is felt over the whole area of commerce. Thus, 
very slowly, and from almost unperceived beginnings, 
our mills have been showing more signs of anima¬ 
tion. Their working is partial and fitful, doubtless; 
still, the tables prove that the number of our employed 
operatives has been on the increase. As stocks of 
calico are sold off, they must be replenished at any 
cost; and thus trade opens to the manufacturer. 

When we point with satisfaction to the increase of 
employment in our factories, it must not be concealed 
that, from the great inferiority of the cotton, the work 
is proportionately more trying and less remunerative to 
the operative. It is calculated that in a mill where a 


336 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


decent Surat is used, and the machinery is adapted to 
it, the cloth produced is about two-thirds in quantity 
of what it would have been with American material. 
The character of the work greatly depends upon the 
adaptation of the machinery. Can we explain to the 
uninitiated reader the mystery of manufacturing ? The 
fibre of the Surat cotton is very short: if you pull it in 
pieces, it snaps like a stick, instead of being drawn 
gently out into lengthening threads, as is the case with 
the long-stapled Sea Islands article. The rollers conse¬ 
quently on which the cotton fibre passes from one to 
the other must be brought nearer together ; but this 
involves a great derangement of the whole machinery, 
and necessarily considerable outlay. Now, when the 
rollers are widely apart, as for the long-stapled 
American cotton, the working of Surat is attended with 
unceasing trouble, worry, and delay in piecing. When, 
however, the machinery is changed, and the material 
tolerably good, the work is much less irksome. A 
cloth may be produced from this Surat so unexception¬ 
able in appearance that an inexperienced eye can 
scarcely distinguish it from the Sea Islands calico; but 
we have reason to believe that in lasting quality it is 
very defective. 

The very name of Surat has become odious in these 
parts. The wretched stuff that has been sent from 
India, mixed with dirt, iron, and stones, in order to 
increase the weight, is likely enough to add a new 
word to the English vocabulary, and to associate the 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


337 


term Surat with everything that is ‘ vile and refuse.’* 
At the last Liverpool Assizes an action for slander was 

* [The ‘CottonFamine’ was doubtless a bitter Castalia; but, 
as might have been expected, it was the spring of inspiration in 
the production of many provincial ballads and poetical pieces. 
Mr. Harland, in his Lancashire Lyrics , Modern Songs and 
Ballads of the County Pcdatine (1866), has allotted a separate 
place to ‘ The Lays of the Cotton Famine.’ We give a few verses, 
as a specimen, from one of the best of these productions—‘Tickle 
Times,’ by Edwin Waugh, a local poet of some celebrity, who 
mostly writes in the Lancashire dialect:— 

Here’s Robin looks fyerfully gloomy 
An’ Jamie keeps starin’ atth’ greawnd, 

An’ thinkin’ o’ th’ table at’s empty, 

An’ th’ little things yammerin’ reawnd; 

It’s true, it looks dark just afore us,— 

But, keep your hearts eawt o’ your shoon,— 
Though clouds may be thickenin’ o’er us, 

There’s lots o’ blue heaven aboon ! 

But, when a mon’s honestly willin’, 

An’ never a stroke to be had, 

And clemmin’ for want or a shillin’,— 

No wonder ’at he should be sad ; 

It troubles his heart to keep seein’ 

His little brids feedin’ o’ th’ air ; 

And it feels very hard to be deein’, 

An’ never a mortal to care. 

But life’s sich a quare little travel,— 

A marlock wi’ sun an’ wi’ shade,— 

An’ then, on a bowster o’ gravel, 

They lay ’n us i’ bed wi’ a spade; 

It’s no use a peawtin’ an’ fratchin’— 

As th’ whirligig’s twirlin’ areawnd ; 

Have at it again; and keep scratchin’ 

As lung as your yed’s upo’ greawnd. 

Z 


VOL. II. 


338 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


tried, on the plea that an ill-natured fellow had called 
his neighbour’s brewery a Surat brewery, and his ale 
Surat ale, and had thus accomplished his ruin. The 
anecdote told by John Bright is not without its humour, 
and it is suggestive of a general truth. In a chapel 
near Rochdale the minister was offering up prayer, and 
asking fervently for many blessings, among which was 
a plentiful supply of cotton. As is usual with a certain 
class of Nonconformists, there followed many ejacula¬ 
tions, such as 1 amen,’ 1 so be it,’ ‘ yea, plenty of cotton,’ 
1 abundance of cotton,’ when a deep bass voice was heard, 

One feels, neaw ’at times are so nippin’, 

A mon’s at a troublesome schoo’, 

That slaves like a horse for a livin’, 

An’ flings it away like a foo’; 

But, as pleasure’s sometimes a misfortin, 

An’ trouble sometimes a good thing,— 

Though we livin’ o’ th’ floor, same as layrocks, 

We ’n go up, like layrocks, to sing. 

Among other hardships of the time, the necessity of weaving 
Surat cotton stirred up the poetic faculty of some of the opera¬ 
tives. Surat is a city in the province of Guzerat, an extensive 
cotton-growing district; but doubtless under its name was classed 
all the bad material that came from India. There was a song 
entitled ‘The Surat Warps’ in Notes and Queries , June, 1865, 
wherein maledictions, deep and dire, are heaped on that kind of 
cotton. And Mr. Harland, in his Lancashire Lyrics (p. 298), 
gives us ‘ The Shurat Weaver’s Song,’ by Samuel Laycock, of 
which we insert the first verse:— 

Confeaund it; aw ne’er wur so woven afore, 

Mi back’s welly brocken, mi fingers are sore; 

Aw’ve bin starin an’ rootin’, among this Shurat, 

Till aw’m very near gettin as bloint as a bat.—1866.] 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


339 


ascending ah imo pectore , 1 Yea, yea, plenty of cotton— 
but not Surat—not Surat.’* 

Emigration may have done some little towards re¬ 
ducing the expenditure of our relief committees ; but it 
cannot have effected much. If conducted on a judicious 
principle, we conceive that it ought to be encouraged ; 
but it can never in itself affect very sensibly the present 
state of the distressed districts. Our manufacturers 
seem to have been impressed with a dread of it very 
unnecessarily. Mr. Edmund Potter’s scheme of subsi¬ 
dising the unemployed, in order to maintain them in 
working condition for the coming prosperity of the 
cotton trade, is one of the many illustrations we have, 
how a man clever in the details of his own business 
seems to get bewildered when he steps into the wider 
area of social politics. 

But our improved condition is owing also, and in a 

* There must sometimes be amusing passages among the in¬ 
terlocutors on such occasions, in whatever tone of solemnity they 
may be conveyed. We heard the following anecdote, illustrative 
of this, from a person who, we believe, was a participator in the 
incidents. At the time of the Peterloo riots the Government of 
the day was very unpopular here. Now, about that period the 
minister of a chapel in Manchester, among other blessings which 
he asked, prayed that the members of his Majesty’s Government 
might ‘ all hang together by one cord.’ This was followed by a 
perfect chorus of ‘ amens,’ ‘ so be its,’ ‘ yeas,’ and ‘ glorys; ’ when, 
finding out his equivocal petition, he changed the expression, and 
said, ‘May they all hang together in con-cord! ’ Hereupon a dead 
silence ensued, till an old woman in a shrill treble shouted, 
* Any cord—any cord—so it be strong enough,’ which was backed 
up by a hailstorm of approving ejaculations. 


340 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


great degree, to that revival in many trades unconnected 
with cotton manufactures, which almost invariably 
appears with the spring and summer. Bricklayers, 
painters, joiners, shoemakers, tailors, dressmakers, 
bonnet-makers, needlewomen, hawkers, porters, and 
such like, have necessarily more work in towns at this 
season; while brick-making affords employment for 
many in the suburbs, and there is a considerable 
demand for farm labour at the time of haymaking and 
the corn harvest. 

Then the active portion of'the unemployed operatives 
have been pushing out into fresh occupations. Trade 
has been brisk in adjoining counties, and a really handy 
workman will never sit in idleness. It is mainly the 
dull, heavy lumberers who stand with their feet stick¬ 
ing in the mire, and never make an effort to extricate 
themselves. This is a class which is as observable in 
times of prosperity as of distress,—no help will lift them 
into independence of thought and action; but a clever man 
or woman will seek new opportunities of making a liveli¬ 
hood, if old ones fail. And now many have taken up 
with fresh employments at home or abroad, and have 
been able to make their own living without troubling 
a relief committee. This was a very noticeable trait 
in our sewing schools: the thoughtless and indifferent 
remained there, easy and contented with their lot, 
while in many instances the intelligent and energetic 
were able after awhile to adopt some fresh occupation, 
and to maintain themselves in independence. 

We are almost glad that comparatively little space is 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


341 


left for our speculations on the future. Zadkiel may be 
in his right sphere when he is prophesying, or, as he 
prefers to call it, 1 predicting; ’ so may St. Leger seers; 
so may Mr. Villiers, who on the ruins of his falsified 
prognostications in 1862 continues to vaticinate in this 
present month of July ; but most men find such an 
amusement profitless and disappointing. As however 
we are entitled to entertain an opinion as well as 
others, we will state it briefly, giving our reasons for 
it, and leaving the reader to estimate them at what they 
are worth. 

The Times is perplexed at the apparent discrepancies 
between our present improved condition and the gloomy 
anticipations for the coming winter which some enter¬ 
tain ; and Sir James P. Kay-Shuttleworth, than whom 
no one is more conversant with the whole question, 
endeavours to reconcile the seeming inconsistency. 
Sir James is very naturally desirous that the charity of 
the country should not cease to flow, and is therefore 
anxious to explain that the improvement in our circum¬ 
stances now is owing to a variety of agencies which 
will cease before the coming winter. Now we are well 
aware that certain trades, which revive in spring and 
summer, must experience a decay in winter; we are 
assured that at that season the distress in these districts 
must increase ; still we are not so apprehensive as are 
Sir James and his colleagues in the Central Committee, 
that there will be the same pressure on our resources 
at the close of this year as we experienced at the end of 
1862. 


342 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


During the last twelve months two millions sterling, 
in round numbers, have been contributed for the relief 
of the distress, and the two General Committees have 
expended for this purpose about 1,200,000/. The 
funds, in hand and promised, amount to 700,000/., or 
thereabouts. The question is, How long will this sum 
last? At the present rate of expenditure, it will extend 
over thirteen months; at the rate which it attained in 
December, 1862, it will not hold out for five. It 
becomes therefore a most important matter to husband 
and economise these resources. Charity will not alto- 
gether cease ; but it will flow much more languidly 
than it did last year. Throughout the country the 
freshness of its effervescence will have passed away ; in 
the towns connected with the distressed districts the 
high poor’s rates will draw off the superfluous means of 
the citizens; and in the counties the application of the Act 
for the rate in aid is beginning to startle the landowners 
—for a landlord’s question it must assuredly become. 

In looking into the future, we are thankful that there 
is now an assured prospect of a bountiful harvest; and 
no greater boon can be bestowed upon us by a good 
•Providence at this or at any other time. When the 
harvest is deficient, trade languishes, and scarcity pre¬ 
vails throughout our land; when it is abundant, the 
face of society is changed : food is cheap, money circu¬ 
lates, employment is more general, the country is rich 
in produce, and the town shares its prosperity. At the 
present season especially will the effects of a plentiful 
harvest be felt in cheapening food, and increasing the 
demand for labour. 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD . 


343 


The influence of the Public Works Act will undoubt¬ 
edly be very salutary. Though it will only give em¬ 
ployment to thirty thousand able-bodied men, the 
wages it dispenses will reach ninety thousand indivi¬ 
duals, taking wives and families into the reckoning. But 
its effect will be felt, not simply in easing the relief 
funds, but—which is far more important—in counter¬ 
acting that inevitable demoralisation which idleness 
generates. A large body of the operatives will be 
contented to lounge out their lives with a low fare and 
a lazy occupation, if they are permitted; but the Public 
Works Act will come in opportunely to prevent this 
settling upon the lees of sloth, while it gives the honest 
man of independent will a chance of earning his living 
again by his own hands. It will conduce to the 
health of our population too, if judiciously applied. 
But the hands of the operatives ? ‘ Ay, there’s the 

rub.’ We are told that they must be maintained in 
their delicacy. Probably, sir, you would wash those 
hands daily with rose-water, and cover the fingers with 
white kid gloves, and spoon-feed the owners of those 
flexible instruments? We should be amused often 
with these newspaper correspondents who write from a 
distance about our operatives, if they did not occasion¬ 
ally excite a nascent inclination in us—immediately 
suppressed, of course—to administer a gentle rebuke 
(with our boot) to the most intelligent part of their 
persons. We sometimes fancy that a wicked manufac¬ 
turer has crammed them with a deceptive jest, and then 
stood looking on and laughing, while they are fussily 


344 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


propounding it in the public prints as a solemn fact. 
First, if every hand were irretrievably spoiled for spin¬ 
ning by out-door labour, better employ the men thus 
than allow them to rest and rot in indolence. But 
what is the truth in this matter ? Take an establish¬ 
ment where the material is manufactured through every 
process: assume that 400 operatives are employed in 
it. Of these 300 are females, 100 males; of the 
males about 34 are engaged in the spinning depart¬ 
ment ; and of these 34 there are some 24 with whom 
a certain delicacy of touch is requisite. But even these, 
if they had been employed in hard manual labour for a 
lengthened period, would regain this sensibility in a 
very short time. We asked a practical manufacturer 
only yesterday his opinion on this question, when he 
smiled, and answered us by saying, ‘We have been 
altering and adding to our mill for some months ; and 
one of the piecers, who had been a considerable time 
engaged in hard hand-work with the bricklayers, came 
into the spinning room last week, and as a joke began 
his old work. He dipped his fingers in the oil, as the 
piecers do, and tried his hand, when he found that he 
could have done it just as well as ever, even if he had 
been called on to start on the instant.’ 

Our condition for the winter will depend much, 
doubtless, on the coming supply of cotton. It is how¬ 
ever quite impossible to estimate with any degree of 
accuracy the amount that we shall have for consumption 
—so many elements must be taken into consideration 
which are quite out of the range of calculation. The 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


345 


quantity of cotton in stock even is no safe criterion of 
the state of employment in our mills. It may be that 
some of our readers are not mercantile, and may ask in 
their simplicity, 1 If our operatives are in want, and 
cotton is in the country, why is it not used ? ’ If you 
turn to a Liverpool cotton broker’s circular, you will 
find that the stock is divided under the three heads— 
for consumption, for export, and for speculation. But 
what is meant by this class for speculation? The 
article is not intended to be spun, but to be bought and 
sold; it is never removed from its resting-place, but 
passes from hand to hand, as railway property did, by 
means of scrip, in the day of the great mania; and as 
certain traffickers in scrip found at last that they had so 
much waste paper in their pockets, so we trust it will 
be with these gamblers in cotton. There is something 
exquisitely provoking in the cold-blooded dealings of 
these dicers. We presume it would be a contempt of 
the laws of our land, and treason against the noble 
science of political economy, but we should scarcely 
hesitate to revive an ancient amusement, and admi¬ 
nister a temporary suspension by the heels to some 
of these well-fed, double-chinned regraters and fore¬ 
stalled. 

But it is said by Sir J. P. Kay-Shuttleworth, in his 
letter to the Times , July 6, that the stocks which have 
been heretofore sinking will be replenished before 
winter, and that consequently the mills which have 
lately started must cease to run. This seems to be 
questionable, taking a broad view of our markets; the 


346 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


stocks have now been diminishing for two years, and it 
is scarcely probable that the fitful revival of work in a 
comparatively few mills can so restore them as to render 
the present amount of production unnecessary. Linen is 
now brought into more use, it is true, and invention 
has produced cloths in which other materials are largely 
mixed with cotton; but taking all this into account, we 
cannot but think that the stocks of calico must decrease 
rather than otherwise, while the mills are at work only 
three days a week. And we must bear in mind, that 
though our factories are running half time, they are not 
producing half the ordinary quantity of goods. 

We have, further, great hope for the future, in that 
we have gained experience by the past. We have 
shown into what confusion we were suddenly brought 
at the end of last year: the very best-regulated com¬ 
mittees, we are assured, fell at that time into many 
unavoidable errors; but what was then almost beyond 
control will not be so for the future. There have been 
a hundred and seventy local relief committees in opera¬ 
tion, suddenly got together, almost self-elected, consist¬ 
ing of many classes, and entertaining a great variety of 
sentiment. Now, very much will depend on their vigi¬ 
lance, judgment, and economy for the approaching 
winter. At the present time their labours are light; 
the numbers relieved by them are comparatively few ; 
they are better acquainted with the poor who claim 
their aid; they can take a calm view of their position. 
Now that their list is almost becoming a tabula rasa , 
let them be very discriminating in their selection of the 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


347 


returning applicants for relief. Strictness in investiga¬ 
ting cases, and firmness in dealing with them, is the 
truest mercy to the poor. On the management of these 
local committees perhaps more than anything else, will 
depend the success of our operations for the winter. 
And if these words should meet the eye of any of the 
clergy engaged in this work, let them bear to be told, 
that upon them, more than any other class, will the 
responsibility of this duty rest. The labours of the 
clergy have been very great: let them always remember 
that with these must be combined an insight into human 
nature, business-like habits, firmness of resolution, con¬ 
stant vigilance, and strict impartiality. To be begging 
up and down, and to be giving up and down, are con¬ 
genial with some dispositions ; but to beg indiscrimi¬ 
nately and to give indiscriminately are the marks of a 
weak mind. We knew a lady who always took a box 
of sugar-candy into her Sunday-school class, and dis¬ 
tributed the sweets to her pupils who had coughs; but 
somehow, though her class was always a favourite one 
with the scholars, it seemed to be invariably suffering 
from chronic hoarseness and catarrh. 

‘Lancashire under a cloud,’ is the title of this 
article. When are we to see the commercial cloud 
passing away, and the material cloud of smoke returning, 
unseemly in itself, but an emblem of plenty in the 
poor man’s home ? When will this wretched war 
between brethren come to a close, and cease to be a 
blot upon human nature ? And yet how marvellously 
has this obstruction to our trade brought out into 


348 


LANCASHIRE UNDER A CLOUD. 


conspicuous relief the wondrous elasticity of our national 
resources ! A dearth of cotton, it was once supposed, 
would be the ruin of our country, or reduce it to a 
third-rate power; and lo, our revenue for the year 
ending June, 1863, exhibits a net increase of almost a 
million. While, therefore, we may confess to some 
humiliation, as residents in these districts and jealous for 
their financial importance, when we see them suffering 
without affecting the general prosperity, let us take 
pride in the more cosmopolitan reflection that we belong 
to a nation, which, like the giant of ancient fable, derives 
vigour from every fall, and which is as expansive in its 
sympathies as it is mighty in strength and fertile in 
undeveloped resources. 


349 


IX. 

THE CLOUD DISPERSING. POSTSCRIPT— 

1866. 

- ♦- 

As we are now writing, the cloud has in a great 
measure passed away from our manufacturing districts. 
Some time doubtless must elapse before the stream of 
trade can flow on with unfluctuating smoothness; but 
our workpeople are now employed, and the horizon of 
commerce looks bright and cheering. It is singular 
how soon sights and scenes that made so deep an im¬ 
pression on our hearts as they were passing before our 
eyes in their reality, seem to fade away from the 
memory, like so many dissolving views in their airy 
and fantastic unrealities. And yet so it is: we who 
were engaged so unceasingly and intensely in efforts to 
stay the approach or divert the onslaught of gaunt 
famine, as well as they who were smarting under its 
ravenous fangs,—all of us are entertaining already but 
vanishing impressions of the trials we encountered in 
that dark valley of tribulation through which we were 
three weary years in passing. It seems as though men 



350 


THE CLOUD DISPERSING. 


engaged in the stern battle of life must gird up their 
loins for present conflict and look on to future warfare, 
and are thus compelled to turn their backs on past 
dangers and struggles, as matters with which they have 
no further concern. Still, the past should leave its 
lessons behind it: out of the infliction of evil there 
mostly issues moral and material good. 

It must be a matter of thankfulness to all reflecting 
minds, that our manufacturing districts have been 
enabled to pass with so little injury through a visitation 
unprecedented in its severity and duration. On looking 
over the years of the ‘ Cotton Famine,’ it is easy for 
political economists, who have been luxuriating in their 
snug libraries afar off, to lecture us oracularly on points 
that might have been managed better; but the result 
is before us, not in specious words, but in tangible form 
and figure.* Our operatives have been sustained; they 

* Three publications have appeared—not to mention poetical 
effusions—on the late long-continued distress in the manufac¬ 
turing districts. The work of Mr. Arnold, an Assistant Com¬ 
missioner, is what it pretends to be—a plain and impartial 
History of the Cotton Famine up to the date of its publication. 
Mr. Torrens’s Lancashire Lesson consists of 187 pages of fierce, 
well-written invective against divers persons and institutions, 
but chiefly against Mr. Commissioner Farnall. It contains a great 
waste of virtuous indignation, which might have been useful if 
properly applied. Mr. Torrens is prolific in his complaints and 
bitter in his charges, but vague in the expedients and hazy in the 
remedies he suggests. He is especially wrathful that in the relief 
of the distress, doles from private charity should have been com¬ 
bined with those from the rates. As a general principle we fully 
admit that it would be extremely injudicious to unite the two; 


THE CLOUD DISPEL SING. 


351 


have suffered no material demoralisation from being 
recipients of alms; they have in nowise added to the 
criminal calendar of the county in their privations; * 
they have been for the most part ready for mill-work 
again as it has been offered to them; no symptom of 
dissatisfaction has been manifested by them worth the 
mention; no increase in the death-rate of the manufac¬ 
turing districts is traceable, but rather a diminution; 
and no single case of death by starvation can be adduced 
as springing out of the ‘ Cotton Famine.’ 

The two Committees—that which met at the London 
Mansion House and the Central Executive in Manchester 
—through which the relief funds were distributed, have 
dissolved themselves, as having fulfilled the object for 

but no one who was in the midst of this struggle for life, can pre¬ 
tend for a moment that it was practicable to have kept them apart 
in the winter of 1862-3. When Lord Derby, in August, 1862, 
urged so persistently that the contributions of charity should only 
be dispensed to those who had not received parochial relief, he 
could not have been aware how far pauperism had then extended. 
At that time one in every six or seven out of the whole population 
was receiving parochial relief in Blackburn and Ashton-under- 
Lyne, and a proportion almost as great in Rochdale, Stockport, 
and Preston; while the distress was growing in extent and in¬ 
tensity from week to week, and the whole country was looking 
on in alarm, and earnestly urging the distribution of the funds 
it had subscribed. The Facts of the Cotton Famine, by John 
Watts, Ph.D., a Member of the Central Relief Committee, is the 
last of these publications : it has been carefully prepared, is ex¬ 
haustive of the subject, and may be safely used as a book of 
reference on the crisis through which we have lately passed. 

* * See Mr. Justice Blackburn’s charge to the Grand Jury at 
Manchester, December 5, 1864. 


352 


THE CLOUD DISPERSING. 


which they were constituted. They have done their 
work well; and it is remarkable with what unanimity 
of approbation from the public their operations have 
been conducted. The Mansion House Committee 
acted with a confiding liberality during the darkest 
periods of the distress, and every local relief association 
owes to it a debt of gratitude and thanks. To the 
Lord Mayor, W. Cubitt, Esq., who first presided over the 
Committee, a testimonial is to be presented, which he 
well deserves. And it would be an unwarrantable 
omission, in concluding our remarks on the ‘ Cotton 
Famine,’ if we did not express our admiration of the 
mode in which the Central Executive Committee in 
Manchester has carried on tb its close the important, 
difficult, and delicate operations with which it was 
charged. It has acted throughout with energy, cour¬ 
tesy, sound judgment, and a conscientious sense of duty; 
and to these characteristics we may add, strict economy. 
When we refer to its balance-sheet for twelve months, 
published on the 20th of July, 1863, we find that the 
interest of the money in the bank almost covered the 
working expenses; and that the main portion of these 
consisted in advertising—not in putting forth appeals to 
the sympathy of the nation, but simply in acknowledging 
the contributions that were coming in from all quarters. 
To the Earl of Derby, the Chairman, and Sir James P. 
Kay-Shuttle worth, the Vice-Chairman, are our thanks 
especially due; nor must we forget the Honorary 
Secretary, Mr. J. W. Maclure, who has combined 
throughout great aptitude for organisation with inde- 


THE CLOUD DISPERSING. 


353 


fatigable perseverance in the discharge of his arduous 
duties. The very substantial and at the same time 
graceful testimonial of 5,000Z., raised altogether from 
private contributions, is soon to be presented to him, 
as an acknowledgment of his services. The sum may 
seem large; but Mr. Maclure is a comparatively young 
man, and has yet to make his way in the world through 
business to independent fortune.* 

* Like many large organisations, that of which the Central 
Executive Committee was the head, had a very small beginning. 
Like some mighty river which carries on its bosom a fleet of 
vessels laden with merchandise, but which in its rise is only a 
small rill scarcely springing to the earth’s surface, this associa¬ 
tion, which has received and dispensed its hundreds of thousands, 
had some difficulty in struggling into existence. On May 29, 
1862, a small meeting was held in Manchester, to take the 
question of a relief fund into consideration; but some doubted 
whether it were necessary, and the project was postponed. Then 
a proposal was started for a loan fund, from which the operatives 
might have borrowed on certain easy conditions ; but this whim¬ 
sical scheme was of course abandoned. After awhile a Com¬ 
mittee was formed for collecting subscriptions, and distributing 
them in relief,—apparently much less ambitious in its aims than 
its subsequent history would have warranted. Next, the Bridge- 
water House meeting was held ; proposals were made by it for 
amalgamation with the Committee which had just been consti¬ 
tuted here; and on August 25, 1862, the first joint meeting of 
the two Associations was held in the Manchester Town Hall. 
The operations conducted by the Central Executive Committee 
have necessarily been on a very extensive scale. The staff of 
working assistants consisted of twenty-three clerks and thirty- 
three packers; and that their offices have not been sinecures may 
be judged from the following facts which are within our know¬ 
ledge:—that 800 letters have been received by the Honorary 

VOL. II. A A 


354 


THE CLOUD DISPERSING. 


Nor let us forget to mention with respect a class of 
men who came but little before the public generally, 
but whose labours and anxieties were really far greater 
than theirs who constituted the Central Committees,— 
we mean the members of the many local relief associa¬ 
tions throughout the manufacturing districts. We can 
testify to their earnestness, their zeal, their willingness 
to give up their overhours to actual work in the cause, 
their general unanimity of feeling in carrying out their 
projects; and we are confident that they will for the 
most part regard the devotion of their energies at that 
time to the claims of charity, as a memory so agreeable 
as to be a sufficient compensation to them for all the 
sacrifices they made. 

It is almost a universal dispensation, that ultimate 
good results from temporary visitations of trial; and 
so, we doubt not, will i be in the instance of our 
late commercial stagnation. Henceforward, we trust, 
our manufacturing districts will not be dependent on 
one country alone for their supply of cotton. Again, 
Mr. Rawlinson, the Government Engineer, reports 
favourably of the ^undertakings carried out under the 
‘Public Works Act.’ In conducting the various opera¬ 
tions under it, such as paving, sewering, the construction 

Secretary in one day ; that 24,000£. have come in as contributions 
in twelve hours; that 1,300 bales of clothing have been des¬ 
patched to their respective destinations in one week; that up to 
September, 1863, 37,000 letters had been received at the office, 
and upwards of 100,000 despatched from it; and that 280 
printed documents had been issued, amounting in all to upwards 
of 115,000 copies. 


THE CLOUD DISPEESING. 


355 


of waterworks, parks, and cemeteries, occupation was 
afforded to the unemployed, pauperism was obviated, 
and imposture detected; and as these works were all 
intended to be permanent ones, they will remain as the 
inheritances of a passing affliction for the lasting benefit 
of our manufacturing towns. 

And if we turn from material benefits to the moral 
effects of the cotton distress, we believe that it will 
leave behind traces of good. Vice is the ordinary 
offspring of want; and this has been generally exem¬ 
plified in our manufacturing districts during protracted 
seasons of distress: but in the late stagnation of trade, 
long as it was, the ordinary evils of idleness have been 
in a great degree guarded against, and habits of recti¬ 
tude have been encouraged. Many of the male opera¬ 
tives were taught the use of those physical powers which 
are not called into exercise in the factory, and this con¬ 
duced to their health; the females were instructed in 
sewing and domestic economy; most of the unemployed 
were brought under the instruction of the school; all 
underwent some process of education, mental or bodily. 
Then, consider how the seeds of many virtues and 
graces may germinate, when the hard soil has been 
stirred up by the ploughshare of suffering. During the 
time of this privation we have witnessed many admirable 
qualities in our working classes. We do not bestow 
on them that indiscriminate eulogy with which our 
orators from a distance somewhat too lavishly garnished 
their speeches: we write with more experience, and 
consequently more caution, having mixed with them in 
A. A. 2 


356 


THE CLOUD DISPENSING. 


their distresses, sought subscriptions from house to 
house for their aid, and presided at Committees for 
their relief night after night for a twelvemonth. Among 
the lowest of our people doubtless much deception was 
systematically practised for a time; but the genuine 
working class bore their privations with a manful 
patience, and asked for no more than an honest share in 
what the benevolent had provided; nay, in some the 
spirit of independence was so unyielding that they were 
brought to' the very verge of starvation before they 
would condescend to seek or accept any aid whatever. 

On some of our working classes we trust that the past 
season of privation may inculcate a lesson of prudence, 
forethought, and economy, which may not pass away 
like the evening cloud or the morning dew. If those 
who labour for their daily bread in our manufacturing 
towns, would only lay by systematically some portion 
of their wages, as many might do, and combine with fore¬ 
thought habits of temperance and domestic prudence, 
they need not be destitute of any property whatever 
which is really conducive to happiness and comfort. 

Then, observe how the grace of sympathy has been 
elicited by the late pressure of misfortune. In time of 
prosperity there may be affection and goodwill: in a 
season of suffering only can there be sympathy. And 
assuredly at no former period of national trial have we 
witnessed anything approaching to the wide-spread and 
warm feeling of commiseration which has been exhi¬ 
bited towards our working people in their late distress. 
Nor was this the sympathy of feeling merely: it mani- 


THE CLOUD DISPERSING. 


357 


fested itself in acts of unbounded liberality. The 
springs of charity were opened abundantly and flowed 
towards us from all quarters of the globe. From 
Australia, from Canada, from India—the very ends of 
the earth—the sympathy of tens of thousands was 
wafted to us over the waste of waters,—the sympathy 
of those who are of the same race, the same blood, the 
same ancestry as ourselves,—the sympathy of the open 
heart and the full hand. In our own land, too, the 
same tone of fellow-feeling pervaded all ranks; the 
cry for help was answered on all sides,—from the high¬ 
est personage in our realm who had herself experienced 
sorrow, to the working man who had yet enough for his 
wants,—from the peer on his princely domains to him, 
scarcely less wealthy, whose merchandise has the world 
for its market. Thus, it is by the stroke of affliction alone 
that the fairest of the Christian graces is summoned 
from its hiding-place, as the brilliant spark is stricken 
from the flint, or the pure streams gushed from the 
rock as it was smitten by the Law-giver’s rod. 

And when we see patient endurance met by uni¬ 
versal sympathy, may we not expect as a consequence 
a closer union and more friendly relations among the 
several classes of society ? As trade extends, and the 
few grow wealthy, the fear is, lest the distinctions of rank 
and grade may become wider and wider. In our manu¬ 
facturing districts especially, the antagonism between 
capital and labour has never entirely ceased, sometimes 
creating feelings of bitterness and animosity. The 
proprietor of land again has generally regarded those 


358 


THE CLOUD DISPERSING. 


engaged in manufacture with an eye of jealousy or 
distrust. During the late crisis, however, all remains of 
mutual suspicion and dislike were merged in the effort 
to endure on the one hand, and to support on the other 
—to breast the stream, and to aid the strong swimmer. 
They who live by the produce of the land—they who 
reside afar off, and have never seen the factories and 
workshops of our county—combined with all classes 
among us in alleviating a stroke which fell on us 
almost without warning : while they who were suffer¬ 
ing from no fault of their own, repaid the good offices 
of benefactors with a sense of sincere gratitude : and 
thus the furthest ends of the earth have been drawn 
closer; the wide divisions of society have approached 
nearer to each other : the rich man and the poor man, 
the merchant and the artisan, the manufacturer and the 
operative, have met on the bridge that spans the gulf 
between them; and with the mutual salutation there, a 
more general belief is entertained in the reality of human 
sympathy and man’s benevolence to his fellow-man. 

In these Essays the condition and character of the 
working classes in our manufacturing towns have re¬ 
peatedly come under consideration: suggestions have 
been offered for ameliorating their condition and eleva¬ 
ting their character. As a conclusion to the Sketches, 
and as a pendant to these Articles on the * Cotton 
Famine,’ we would venture to direct attention to the 
relation between the employer and the employed, and 
in a kindly spirit to urge upon every manufacturer the 
duty of taking a personal interest in the moral welfare 


THE CLOUD DISPERSING-. 


359 


of his workpeople. Laws may do somewhat for bene¬ 
fiting the working classes; associations for the further¬ 
ance of useful objects may not be without avail; reli¬ 
gious ministrations may have their effect; education may 
not be unproductive: but these agencies must ever be 
comparatively ineffectual for general good on the opera¬ 
tive classes, unless they be combined with that personal 
influence which may be exercised by master on man, 
and which, springing out of a conscientious sense of 
responsibility, owns a diviner origin than enactments 
and institutions. 

We should be sorry to give offence to our mill-owners, 
many of whom are sincerely anxious for the wellbeing 
of their workpeople ; but, after considerable experience 
in manufacturing districts, we have formed and we freely 
express the opinion, that very much must ever depend 
on the head of a factory, in promoting morality and 
comfort among his 1 hands.’ If the operative classes 
are to be elevated in the social scale, the employer must 
look upon his workpeople as immortal beings as well as 
daily labourers; he must consider that his relation to 
them goes beyond the mere exaction of work and pay¬ 
ment of wages. It is one of the ill effects of increasing 
refinement and accumulating wealth, that the line of 
demarcation between classes becomes gradually broader. 
Communication between the employer and the employed 
is only kept up through the speechless loom and the 
soulless spindle. The capitalist resides for the most 
part as far as he can from the smoke of his own works; 
he elects to breathe the air of nature rather than that 


360 


THE CLOUD DISPERSING. 


of his own mixing. The propensity of the wealthy is 
to push further and further away from their places of 
business, and the facilities for travelling in every direct 
tion afford the opportunity of doing so. Thus, while 
the enormous factory opens its gates to the crowd of 
living beings that are to toil there, the owner is often as 
ignorant of their domestic life and social habits as if he 
and they lived on different hemispheres and spake dif¬ 
ferent tongues. 

How far a master has any right of guidance over his 
workpeople when they are away from his premises, is a 
question we need not consider. We would certainly 
never recommend an employer to trace his operatives 
to their homes, and endeavour to exercise a compulsory 
control over their general conduct. The attempt would 
fail, and it would deserve to do so. But a moral influ-- 
ence of great efficacy may be exerted, so that the elec¬ 
tric vibration may be felt, in a greater or less degree, 
from the one head link by link throughout the thousand 
different members of the establishment down to the 
short-timer of yesterday. That this is no fancy, ex¬ 
perience and observation prove. Mills, like individuals, 
have their idiosyncrasies. You may inspect two that 
stand side by side ; and, taking the female portion of the 
workpeople as the safest test of their general character, 
you may find in one a class for the most part respectable 
in appearance and modest in manner,—in the other, a 
set of rude, immodest, slatternly wenches, who may not 
be inexperienced at their respective tasks, but are clearly 
regardless of the commonest decencies of life. Again, 


THE CLOUD DISPERSING. 


361 


you may watch a couple of mills 1 loosing; ’ and, as the 
separate streams of young women pour out of them, you 
may discern as great a difference between the two as 
there is between the limpid brook and the dye-stained 
river. You may see one female division, quiet and 
decorous, with tidy dresses and neat bonnets,—the other, 
slovenly and rude, with dirty frocks or short bedgowns, 
and their heads wrapped in coarse shawls. To what do 
you attribute this distinction ? It is manifestly owing 
to the difference in moral watchfulness and paternal 
care that are exercised over the daily operations of the 
two factories. 

Over operatives on his premises no one can deny to 
the employer a direct control; and this, when exercised 
in a judicious manner and with a view to a moral end, 
is without question most salutary. Let the owner of the 
factory be assured, first of all, that every one in autho¬ 
rity under him, from the principal manager to the 
lowest overlooker, is a person of reputable character, 
one who will restrain vice and encourage virtue in those 
under his charge. The power in the hand of the over¬ 
looker is almost uncontrolled and irresponsible; and we 
cannot conceal from ourselves, that it is too often exerted 
for evil. Imagine some three hundred young women 
assembled at their work in one large room,—many of 
them from ill-regulated families, some ready to indulge 
in obscene jests, coarse language, and licentious songs, 
most of them with unrestrained girlish fancies and an 
unthinking levity of manner. Assume, on the one hand, 
that the several overlookers in that room do their duty 


362 


THE CLOUD DISPERSING. 


as honest, well-conducted men, controlling, reproving, 
advising the giddy under their direction ; and at least 
decency will prevail: assume, on the other hand, that 
these overlookers, so far from checking vice, encourage it 
by the exampleof their own profane and obscene language, 
if not by their actual temptations to sin, and you have 
before you a female Pandemonium,—for the contagion 
of filthy language and lewd demeanour is more virulent 
and diffusive among young women even than among 
young men. So far there can be no doubt,—that a 
direct obligation lies upon the manufacturer to see that 
every one who exercises authority under him is a person 
in whose moral character the fullest confidence may be 
placed. It is as incumbent on him to look to this as it 
is on the master of a household to supervise the behaviour 
of his domestics. Then, let it be known from experi¬ 
ence throughout the mill that acts of impropriety will 
not be overlooked; and, if bad characters be discovered 
among the operatives, demoralising the young of either 
sex, let them as an unvarying law be summarily dis¬ 
missed. And why not insist that the females especially 
come neat and cleanly to their work?—at least in bonnets 
and frocks, and not with bedgowns, pinafores enveloping 
linsey petticoats, and greasy shawls around their heads; 
for the girl that has no regard whatever for personal 
appearance will not have much for personal character. 
And let it never be forgotten that the employer should 
conduct all his transactions with his operatives from 
first to last in a spirit of justice, and at the same time 
of kindness. When bad materials are to be wrought 


THE CLOUD DISPERSING. 


363 


up at the cost of much worrying labour; when there is 
frequent ‘bateing’ for slight defects; when wages are re¬ 
duced to the lowest figure by regulations of needless strict¬ 
ness and evasions backed by power; a tone of bitterness is 
sure to pervade the minds of the workpeople, and they 
go through their employment in the sullen temper of 
those who are maintaining an armed truce. But if the 
administration of that limited monarchy within four 
walls be conducted equitably and honourably, its sub¬ 
jects will perceive at once the justice of their treat¬ 
ment, and work, not as slaves, but as willing freemen; 
and when, with justice, a tone of benevolence pervades 
the master’s dealings with his ‘ hands,’ not showing itself 
so much in particular acts as running through the 
whole web of their intercourse, there will be an admis¬ 
sion on the part of the servants that they are honestly 
dealt with, and on both sides a tacit acknowledgment 
of mutual responsibility. 

And not only over his operatives as they are engaged 
at their work may the manufacturer have supervision, 
but upon their moral wellbeing generally may he exercise 
a powerful, though, it may be, an indirect influence. He 
may interest himself in their education; he may estab¬ 
lish evening schools for them, if such be required, and 
he may occasionally be present there himself, marking 
those who attend, encouraging those who are making 
progress, and saying a kind word to any of them as 
opportunity may offer. In certain districts he may 
provide or build for his workpeople cottages with suffi¬ 
cient rooms for a well-conducted family, affording 


364 


THE CLOUD DISPERSING. 


them the privilege of a decent dwelling at a reasonable 
cost. Within the parish where his operatives mostly 
reside, he may take part in those public meetings which 
are intended to benefit the working classes, and he may 
join in carrying out their objects. He may give his 
‘hands’ an occasional treat, not leaving them to the 
superintendence of a manager, but mixing with them 
himself, and addressing them collectively and indi¬ 
vidually in terms of counsel and encouragement. And 
at their homes, how often might his family, his wife or 
daughters, pay to some of them at a period of trial and 
sickness a visit of mercy—avoiding everything like 
obtrusion and ostentation—offering, as Christian women 
only can, without assumption of superiority, the hand 
of sympathy and the material aid that might be needed ! 
By such means, wherever they are tried, a moral power 
is more or less gained over a body of* workpeople, who 
can clearly distinguish the just from the unjust, and are 
ever ready to appreciate consideration and goodwill; 
by such means the manifestation of kindness elicits a 
reciprocity of esteem, and the spirit of honesty and truth 
evidenced in one becomes a sentiment in the minds of 
many. 

It is a feeling very prevalent among our wealthy 
employers of labour, that they fulfil every moral 
requirement, when they give a certain sum to religious 
and educational purposes, and leave the rest to profes¬ 
sional ministers and teachers, with whom probably they 
have no acquaintance whatever. Even with many who 
have contributed liberally to the building of churches 


THE CLOUD DISPEL SING. 


365 


and schools, this notion seems to prevail. But the mere 
act of joining in a subscription is exerting only a small 
portion of that influence which has been deposited with 
them, and is bound up in their position : it is simply 
setting aside a sum they can well spare without dis¬ 
turbing their personal ease and comfort. We are far 
from saying that this is not a commendable trait of 
character in itself; but if any extensive good is to be 
accomplished, it must be by a combination of liberality 
with that practical endeavour to benefit which supe¬ 
riority of station can render so effective. Indeed, what¬ 
ever be our rank in life and whatever the wdJrk we have 
to do, the main motive to duty will be found in a sense 
of personal responsibility : the more we individualise 
this consciousness, the more distinctive will be our 
views of action and the stronger our incentives to it; the 
more we generalise, the more shall we merge our identity 
in that of others and give a corporate character to spe¬ 
cific obligations. Now, the tendency of wealthy em¬ 
ployers is to allow their own personality to be absorbed 
in a body that holds authority under them; they are 
themselves abstractions, so far as their workpeople are 
concerned; they are known only through managers, 
overlookers, bookkeepers, and clerks. But there is evil 
lurking here. From one man walking in a full sense of 
his individual responsibility a virtue goes forth which 
more or less inoculates the whole establishment,— 
managers, bookkeepers, and operatives. In thus striving 
tp act upon those around him, the employer will have to 
gird up his energies and to contend against his natural 


366 


THE CLOUD DISPENSING. 


love of ease ; he will not think it enough to write out 
a cheque for 100Z. towards some new church or school, 
or to be an annual subscriber for the support of religious 
or educational institutions; but he will put his own 
hands to the plough, and make the importance of his 
position the measure of his personal agency. By these 
means he may within his own circle be more influential 
for good than the clergyman himself; nay, he may be 
his pastor’s right hand and right eye in the operations of 
a parish generally. It would be too much to expect 
this vigour of benevolent action in men of declining 
years; but in most firms there are sons and relatives, 
or at any rate junior members, on whom the manage¬ 
ment devolves; and such are without excuse, if they 
set at nought these obligations, and turn from their 
ledgers and cotton speculations only to pursue their idle 
amusements and luxurious self-indulgencies. 

But we will go further, and assert, that even in a 
worldly sense the employer is unwise who neglects the 
moral duties attached to his station. Nothing pays so 
well in a mill as a just, careful, and judicious manage¬ 
ment : it implies good machinery and raw material of a 
satisfactory class; it ensures a fair rate of wage on the 
one hand, and a readiness and an ability to turn off the 
best work on the other. Mark a factory where the ma¬ 
chinery is old, the material bad, and the hands are 
loose and dissolute: what can you expect as a conse¬ 
quence of this state of things, but defective work, inces¬ 
sant disturbances about wages, and frequent turn-outs ? 
See another where the machinery is of the most improved 


THE CLOUD DISPEL SING. 


367 


kind and the cotton good,—where the wages are ade¬ 
quate and the dealings equitable,—where the master is 
kind, and the workpeople are grateful,—and you may 
recognise an investment which, in the steadiness and 
comfort that attend it, will pay far better than mere 
casual speculations in cotton or incidental advantages 
in the market. 

And now that our faces are turned towards a bright¬ 
ening future, it would be a great lesson to have learned 
from distress, if the several classes of the community 
could be brought to look more kindly on each other, 
and to regard their interests as identical. It was a noble 
manifestation of generosity, we repeat, as the remotest 
nations of the earth heard our cry, and sent across the 
waters their contributions to our aid. It was a grand 
outburst of benevolence, as our countrymen of every 
rank, from the sovereign on her throne to the artisan in 
his cottage, extended to the operative in his enforced 
idleness a brotherly sympathy and a material assistance. 
It was a magnificent spectacle, as the foremost peer in 
Lancashire—distinguished by birth, by fortune, by ora¬ 
torical powers, by refined scholarship—stood side by side 
with the landowner, the clergyman, the manufacturer, 
the merchant, and the shopkeeper in public meeting, 
and pleaded so eloquently the cause of the poor and 
destitute. It was cheering to witness the alacrity and 
zeal with which the many Relief Committees—consisting 
of members from every religious party and social grade 
—undertook and performed their irksome and unosten¬ 
tatious duties. Let our working people learn from the 


368 


THE CLOUD DISPEBSING. 


affliction that has been heavy on them and the goodwill 
with which it has been alleviated, a lesson of gratitude 
for the past and of forethought for the future ; and let 
those who belong to the higher classes of our land— 
noblemen, country gentlemen, merchants, manufacturers 
—regard the operative, not as one separated from them 
by the deep gulf of caste, but as a man and a brother,— 
as a woman and a sister,—who has many estimable 
qualities, who is not undeserving of their sympathy, 
and who is below them in rank, not from any inferiority 
of natural gifts, but, as the Christian believes, from a 
supreme dispensation,—as Lord Thurlow alleged , 1 from 
the accident of an accident.’ 


THE END. 


LONDON 


FEINTED BY SPOTTI8WOODE AND CO. 
NEW-STBEET SQUARE 















■ V • 




VjiMUiV' 








I 






















LIBRARY OF CONGRESS qg 





